If so, you are lucky - because mine sure aren't. Seems like
every bank or other financial institution that I do business
with is about a decade or so behind in web technology. They
have very, very long and infrequent software development
cycles, don't support recent (much less latest) client
technologies, and have "major new feature releases" that are
pretty darn uninspiring.
I can understand the importance of moving slow when it comes
to people's finances, but it seems they don't really have a
distinction between basic usability and those things that
could result in serious financial exposure. In these days of
distributed systems there's no excuse to muddle UIs with the
backend.
I
apologize that you have encountered this difficulty.
Unfortunately, higher versions of chrome are unsupported with
our website. When a browser version is unsupported the
functionality will be intermittent at best. Sometimes it will
work fine for months, and then one day stop working all
together.
In order to continue using Chrome without issue, please use one of the following supported versions:
· Chrome: Versions 11 or 12
Once again, I do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are continually working on updating our supported browsers, but at this time those are the only truly supported versions.
I have three quick stories from the last year or so across
two different financial institutions. They will remain
nameless, although one of them (which comprises the first
two stories) I'm in the process of closing accounts down,
and in the third I have a great personal relationship with
individual people - and even though their technology is
pretty bad, the institution itself is excellent.
Story #1 - Please Downgrade Your Browser
So I've been using the institution's website several times
a week with no problem, then suddenly it stops working from
Chrome - I was unable to login, it would just redirect me
to the login page. Maybe Chrome updated, I'm not really
sure (my Linux distribution handles updates so well I
seldom pay any attention into what get's updated). So, I
try Firefox and it works fine, I am able to login to
my account, so I fire off an email to customer support to
let them know Chrome 17 (this is May 2012) doesn't work
with their site. Following is the response:
In order to continue using Chrome without issue, please use one of the following supported versions:
· Chrome: Versions 11 or 12
Once again, I do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are continually working on updating our supported browsers, but at this time those are the only truly supported versions.
Realize that the institution's website doesn't do anything
complex - absolutely nothing that an update from Chrome 16
to 17 should cause inability to login. It's only because of
using non-w3c compliant practices that this would happen in
the first place, but it's absolute madness to suggest I
would downgrade back 5 or 6 versions of Chrome! I'm not
even sure how I would do that, does Google even have
archives where you can download old versions?
At least they didn't tell me to use IE. That's the response
I've gotten from a number of customer support interactions
for various things over the years, even after telling them
I'm not on Windows.
I don't remember how long it was before I could use the
site again in Chrome, but it was at least several months,
and I received no notification or follow-up, I just tried
one day and it worked.
How would a more modern
site deal with this? First of all, they would be testing
not only the latest stable versions of browsers, but the
bleeding edge, and be prepared. They would also be agile
with the ability to test and push new releases daily, not
monthly, to resolve fundamental usability issues. Good
customer support would also dictate closing the loop with
the customer, rather than leaving them hanging.
Story #2 - We Will Resolve This In 48 Hours
My paycheck was deposited into one institution, then
partially transferred to another institution (the one in
story #1) via an inter-bank ACH transfer initiated by the
second institution. This had been working fine for a couple
of years, then one day my transfer doesn't go through. Did
they notify me of the failure? Nope. Did the account
transfer page show anything interesting? Nope - the
transfer just disappeared, unlike past transfers which had
a history, it just vanished - like it never happened.
So, being the reasonable person that I am, I called
customer service and opened a ticket with them. They said
they would look into it, and it should be resolved in 48
hours. One month later they resolved the issue. You read
that right, it took a month for their 48 hour fix. For the
first 3 weeks I called them several times a week for a
status, and their answer was always 48 hours - even after
we were in this situation for 3 weeks. All they would tell
me is that they were "investigating the issue" and that it
would be resolved soon. Not knowing what was happening, and
assuming that they would get the transfer through "real
soon now" we ended up going low on funds in that
institution and were basically unable to use our account.
If I had known it would be weeks I would have deposited via
other means, but when I'm told it's only a couple of days
because they are nearly done with the fix I guess I was
overly optimistic. To make matters worse, when I was
concerned about automatic, scheduled payments, they told me
there wouldn't be a problem because the problem was on
their end - fool me once, shame on you... It was a problem
because those payments still went through, even though they
told me all was fine. As it turns out, they finally
admitted it was a software bug in their ACH system, but for
this institution it was too late as we had already taken
our banking elsewhere.
How would a more modern
company deal with this? This isn't strictly a site issue,
but it was a back-end software problem, and repeatedly
telling me it would be resolved in 2 days when in fact it
would take 30 did nothing to help. I'm sure they didn't
actually know, but better to give the customer a
pessimistic answer than an
unreasonably optimistic one. I arranged my
finances based on what they told me and would have reacted
completely differently otherwise. Additionally, I had to
keep calling them for status, as they would never call me
back after the promised 48 hours. They finally did call me
back when it resolved, but by then it didn't matter
anymore.
Story #3 - We Are Experiencing Known Performance Issues
On a Saturday morning I logged into my account at this
institution to check some activity. At least, that's what I
was trying to do - the institution's landing page didn't
mention a thing, and it was only after logging in that they
displayed a page that the site was down for maintenance for
the whole weekend.
Really? Down for the whole weekend for an upgrade? This is
2013! And with zero notification in advance that the
site would be down (they have my email address). And I had to
login to even find out.
The last couple of companies I've worked at have prided
themselves on the ability to do live rolling upgrades with no
site outage. This is not a hard thing to do these days with a
good architecture. Being down for 2 days would mean going out
of business for a lot of places, but for a financial
institution it's considered normal, I guess.
OK great, so now it's Monday morning and I try to login
again. Right, so the page times out. I reload, and after
several minutes, I finally get a page. Clicking on anything
results in a similar pattern - either a timeout or page load
time of several minutes. I tried to use the online feedback
form, but that timed out too.
A call to customer service resulted in a long wait time with
a message that they were aware of site performance issues due
to huge demand for the upgraded site. I guess that's one way
to put it, but clearly they did insufficient testing and
weren't ready for Monday morning. There was no reason for me
to waste support's time at that point, so I hung up and tried
to login again later.
How great was the new site? It sucks just as bad as the old
one did. It's really pretty bad.
How would a more agile
company deal with this? They would test things in advance, do
rolling updates rather than having a site outage for 2+ days,
and route just a portion of traffic to the new site until
being comfortable that all is well prior to a full
cut-over.
What's the lesson from all of this? Financial institution IT
is well behind the times and could learn a lot of things from
agile companies who release continually. Again, I understand
the financial risk, but a good architecture would insulate
those details from the website and it's usability for
customers.