As a German, when living in Sweden, I was (and still am) very impressed, how widespread the use of (Mobile) Bank ID, beside the use of the personal ID number (As a male German, the state has assigned me at least three different ones without requiring any interaction.) for basically everything, is.
In Germany, before introducing a second electronic way of authentication for online (or phone) banking, it was done by a chosen password and a TAN (transaction number) from a list that you regularly got sent by mail in a special envelope. Later it was replaced by that "thingy", a mobile TAN generator, or push TAN via SMS.
It was not special from the outside, but from the inside. It was either the envelope or the TAN list that was printed with a special pattern to prevent reading the list by using a flashlight.