Wait, are you serious?
My bank, a local credit union, just "upgraded" their online banking system, and yes, I do have to set "upgrade" in quotation marks. They were good about announcing it ahead of time on the site. They noted the expected downtime for access. They said that on your first login after the upgrade, you'd have to enter your password with all uppercase where there used to be lower-case letters. (Don't you think that's weird? If they're already sort of using my password, why don't they just leave it the way it is?)
But okay, I waited until they were done with their upgrade - excuse me, "upgrade", and tried to log in again. They gave me a pop-up window reminding me of the new password rules. Okay, that's nice, extra points for that.
Only I couldn't log in. I am certain that I did not forget my password, and that I entered it exactly as they had specified, but it gave me a "user validation error", and finally locked me out. I waited until the weekend to call customer service because I figured this would take a while. Sure enough, the disembodied voice noted they had a higher call volume due to the upgrade. I waited on hold for about 10 minutes (not too bad), spoke to a friendly customer support guy who asked me security questions to verify it was really me, reset my password, and remained on the line with me while I logged in. (Another extra point for that.)
I log in, and look at the new account screen. Wait, is that really my account balance? No, that's dated a week ago. Oh, they have the transactions listed in ascending order, with the most recent items at the bottom of the page. Well, that's not really helpful. Let me re-sort that, so that the most recent transaction, and my current balance, is AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE WHERE I CAN SEE IT.
So I re-sort, and ... now it's a 2-digit figure instead of 4 digits!!!! What the ...?!??!! Where did my money go? Instead of having a panic attack, I click on the online help, and find out that this is the desired behavior, "to avoid confusion": It hides the account balance, and just shows me the transaction amount. Oh. Kaaaaaaay ...
Alright, fine. Whatever. Let me pay my bills now. With a check and an envelope and a stamp. How do I add a transaction? "Pay my bills"? No, that's online payments, that's not what I want.
Hmm. Hrmpf. There does not seem to be a way for me to add my own transactions, forcing me to break out a PAPER REGISTER for the first time in, oh, six years.
I think this may be the final nail in my bank's coffin (their last "upgrade", where they reset everybody's passwords TO BE THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, almost caused me a heart attack).
Can anybody recommend a good bank for me?
P.S. on August 23rd: I did finally figure out ... no, wait, I didn't. I sent an email to their support team, asking if adding and editing transactions was really gone. Turned out it can be found is hidden under "FinanceWorks". FinanceWorks is run by Quicken, and does have a pretty nice interface, and a bunch of nice reporting tools. Plus, I'm back at Apple, and the ATM on campus is Keypoint (my above-mentioned local credit union) ... so maybe I'll stick with them after all. [Le sigh]
I use Bank of America and really like their online banking system. They have a portfolio thing where you can see pie charts of what you've spent stuff on, they do easy bill pay for all kinds of stuff and transfers are a breeze. They charge if you go to another brand ATM, but I can work around that.
And they have an iPhone app for mobile banking too ...
Posted by: Genie | Jul 26, 2009 at 11:03 AM
That sounds promising, thanks, Genie! It was really great to see you again at BlogHer! See you next year with baby in tow?
Posted by: Elkit | Jul 26, 2009 at 03:23 PM