business banking update timescales

Irish Steve

Can someone please give some attention to the issues of a stone age and increasingly restricted and limited business banking application.

As things are right now, I see the following fundamental shortcomings

It will ONLY work with Internet Explorer. Yeah, right. What are the issues with Firefox, Chrome or Safari, among others

It is a fixed 800 x 600 window size, which is becoming an issue on a modern monitor with a much higher resolution, as it's becoming harder to read the text due to the small size of the window.

Some toolbars in Internet Explorer "intrude" into the fixed window of the banking app, which can't cope with it, and important selection options are then pushed off the bottom of the screen and unusable.

It's not possible to set up repetitive (standing order) type transactions.

The administrative maintenance options for things like reading the transaction diary are archaic, slow, and no longer fit for purpose.

If this is the best that BOI can do, I have to wonder about the ability of BOI to provide an acceptable level of service going forward.

I have several small business customers who are having to consider significant changes to their operating environment because of the end of life with XP in April, and one of the considerations for some is that there are lower cost alternatives to Microsoft, which will run on the hardware that is currently in place, as W7 in 2Gb of memory is not going to be a nice experience in an on line environment. 

The issue I have to deal with for these customers is that if they are going to stay with BOI, then they have no choice about their upgrade options, because the on line banking is effectively totally locked into Microsoft, with no alternatives. The costs of upgrade then become significant. 

Pathetic is one way to describe it, Anti competitive would be another, ignorant would be a third, I find it incredible that BOI has allowed itself to become so locked into out of date and inappropriate software at the core of the operation that is being used by probably their most important customers, the business users.

What's worse is that there seems to be no recognition from the BOI management of just how out of date things now are, and no management commitment to doing anything about it, the attitude seems to be one of "it's not broken, so don't fix it". 

So, where are things going, if anywhere, or is the best solution to "suggest" to the clients that it's time to move to another bank that has a better, more comprehensive and less restrictive on line banking system, clearly, BOI-BOL is long past it's sell by date

The imminent changeover to SEPA is clearly not being used to roll out anything significant in the way of updates, as if the advance information were any less low profile and low key, there would be nothing, clearly, the absolute minimum has been done to bring in SEPA, if there had been anything updated or new, it would have been promoted as such, but even now, mid month, the "January" information on the site is very low key, low level and minimalist.


Did I mention that in recent weeks, the performance of the site has become even slower than it used to be, it never was particularly fast, but for the last month or so, something like a recent transaction report can take a very long time to arrive.

I really can't justify telling the clients that they need to have a low spec, cut down Windows based computer just for on line banking, but it's getting that way, due to the restrictions that are forced on the user.

So, I guess I can sum this up very easily. Do BOI have any realistic plans in a sensible timescale to move into the 21st century with the business banking suite?

Is there any light at the end of this tunnel?

Good luck on getting any real answers from the management too

Cheers

Steve

Tow

Don't forget Steve, what you see is their customer facing IT systems. It is the systems we don't see which have me most worried...

Bank of Ireland: Alison

Hi Irish Steve

Thank you for your post.

Although we are aware Business Online will only work on Internet Explorer, the Business Online Development Team is currently working on the mandatory SEPA changeover.

We will ensure your suggestions and concerns will be passed directly to the appropriate department. We understand this may not be the answer you were anticipating, however they will be looked at as a priority after the SEPA changeover is complete.

Thank you for sending such a comprehensive and detailed post.
If you would like to raise your concerns directly, you can certainly send us a Private Message and we will arrange a call back for you.

Thank you
Alison

Thomas_B

Thanks for starting this thread - the BOI Business Online application is indeed horrendous.

Just to clarify for other people reading this - sole traders use a different online banking which is similar to the personal online banking, but anyone who is a registered company has to use an antiquated system that relies on ActiveX and needs Internet Explorer. No amount of browser spoofing will get it to work on any other operating system.

Not only does everyone who isn't a windows user have to run windows in a virtual machine to access their online banking, but the system is slow, confusing, utterly unintuitive and basically rubbish in every way.

I've spoken to my relationship manager in BoI about this a number of times, and reading in between the lines it seems that there are no plans to fix it. Yes I got a vague commitment of "a new version will be rolled out next year", but my sense was there are no concrete plans to do anything.

And they have the cheek to keep charging €15 *per month* for this!

I decided to switch our company account because I was absolutely sick of this, and I think it's the only practical solution. It really isn't that much work to change banks, took me less than half a day to transfer all payroll, direct debits and standing orders. I decided to go with Ulster Bank, their online business banking is much better, they are the only other big bank to offer debit cards with business accounts, and their customer service is slightly better than the SME division in AIB branches (which is horrendous btw). Also Ulster Bank offer an online application form which speeds up the process a bit.

Irish Steve

Tow wrote: »

Don't forget Steve, what you see is their customer facing IT systems. It is the systems we don't see which have me most worried...

I know....... Many years ago, I spent a couple of years working as a consultant setting up IT systems for a BOI subsidiary, which exposed me to some of the BOI culture. That was eye opening!

I also spent a good number of years working with the UK clearers, in back of house systems, so I am very well aware of the back office side of things, and what I am seeing in both back office, and front end, is a system that is still stuck in the stone age, and the few "enhancements" that are being made are dire, like ATM lodgements that have no unique reference number on them, so reconciling a bank statement at the end of the month is a total nightmare, as there is nothing on the lodgement slip to tie it positively to the statement, which is a significant downgrade, the old paper lodgement system had a serial number that came through the system, now all we get is LATM, the branch and the last 4 digits of the card used, which is the same every time. Whoever came up with that "upgrade" has clearly never worked in a business environment on the other side of the counter. It's going to be an auditing nightmare when the accountants start to get to grips with it.

I could go on about other areas like the ATM's that ask if you want a service, and then say they can't provide it, simply because the programming is back to front, If there's no 10 or 20 euro notes in the thing, there's not much point asking the customer if they want a sum that can't be provided, or asking if you want a receipt, and then having to say that it can't be provided. Arseways programming by people that have no real experience of writing a user interface.

I think that moving to another supplier is beginning to look like an urgent requirement, given that I only have 3 months before XP is off support, and you may be sure that BOI will be less than friendly if a user keeps using XP after EOL and their machine is compromised. We won't say too much about BOI not updating their security certificates a while back, so Java was throwing all manner of warnings about not using the application! It took them 6 MONTHS to roll the new certificate out, which tells me something about the quality and number of programmers that they have these days, and a lot about the management's attitude to the security of their application.

The reply from BOI is about what I was expecting, a rewrite of the system is so far down the long finger, it's in danger of falling off. Maybe they're hoping to buy a system in from somewhere else, that's a forlorn hope.

Interesting to see that Ulster are becoming more active, the only worry there is that RBS have had more than their fair share of strife with on line systems over the last while, which would worry me.

Back to the grindstone.