Online banking regression

[mtbc]

I used to bank with the Nationwide Building Society but they stopped accepting deposits of checks in foreign currencies like US dollars. Before then they would simply take many weeks to clear funds from official checks issued by the Federal Government but I could tolerate that. I don't now recall if they can even still do foreign-currency wire transfers. Since then I have used Clydesdale Bank whose online banking has been worse than Nationwide's but still tolerable. For example, they offer no easy way to skip standing order payments and the interface generally organizes information less usefully. It also imposes irritations like having to use one's physical security token to perform simple acts like reducing the amount sent by an existing standing order.

It was with a sinking feeling that I read of new improved online banking coming to Clydesdale. Regarding my complaint some months back about mobile-tastic web-based news aggregators it probably says something that Clydesdale's new online banking appears to think that I am using it from my mobile device and, as is usual for contemporary look and feel, packs far less useful information onto the screen at once. I could live with this but secure messaging has disappeared, it is now just live chat, which I hate as I want time to marshal all the relevant details clearly and correctly and I rarely need immediate action on them. Something more like e-mail makes it easier to review those interactions months afterward.

Even the above could be okay but there are other regressions too: for example, the interface can no longer show me standing orders whose payment amounts are not all identical so if I want to set up or review something like council tax payment then I must talk to bank staff instead. I thought that the point of online banking was to reduce their costs in reducing my need to talk to them. If I click on the help then it takes me straight back to login; I wonder how this passes quality assurance.

I find it unfortunate that choice of online banking interface is determined by choice of bank rather than their agreeing on some common intermediate communication protocol between customer and bank for which I could use my choice of open clients. As things stand I cannot even road-test a new bank's web-based interface without switching to them first. As online banking is a core part of modern customer experience I wonder if people simply expect far less than they should.

I shall be checking which banks have a branch in Dundee or Perth city centers and that have some basic foreign currency capability. Checking for online banking that is more information- and feature-rich than filled with simple large icons will take more effort and for all I know I will be hopping from one to the other as they successively dumb down.

Comments

[mtbc]

They no longer accept US dollar cheques though and there are some things, like American tax refunds, where I am not going to be able to get the organization to do an international wire transfer. Clydesdale actually clear foreign cheques fairly quickly considering they're hardly global.

(I should add: there are a couple of cases where I could ask American friends to simply open an account next time they are in Britain and somehow use that but the account opening restrictions here are impossibly tight for American visitors.)