Co-operative Bank online business banking a joke
It all started a couple of years ago I think. Co-op had a workable Java-based online banking system that I’d been using for about 5 years. Then they announced a fantastic new system a while back and… so many people complained at how hideously unusable it was compared to the existing system that they had to backtrack, apologise, and rework the new system – leaving the old system in tact.
Late in 2006 the second incarnation of the new system was rolled out. They forcefully shut down the old system around that time also, to give us customers no choice but to migrate to the new system. It’s new so it MUST be better, right?
Well it isn’t. There are new features not available previously, but really this application is amazingly bad in terms of user interface. You contrast it with Co-op’s personal online banking and you just think “what the f**k are they doing?”. The personal banking product is fine, good even. Clear, fast, easy to use.
The business banking is full of obscure terminology, shows too much technical banking data, is very slow, and offers very little over the previous version. For this we have waited a couple of years, and had to re-register to be able to use the system. It hasn’t carried over our bill payment information nor all our accounts. Many of the pages don’t render quite right in Safari – although this is an improvement because the previous system only worked in MS IE due to a requirement for an ancient Java VM.
You just wonder what on earth the person who designed this was thinking, and how much money was spent on it. I don’t think I want to know, it will be sickening. I can tell from the error messages that the system uses CORBA (ugh). I liked the error message I got… it didn’t respond to my request to save a recipient’s details so I tried again with the same one… the message along the lines of: “8197: The profile name XXXXX is not unique”. Lovely!
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I completely agree with this. The business banking at the Co-op is awful. Our company took up the offer of free banking through the FSB.
What a mistake.
I don’t think I have ever got through to their business customer service department in less the 30 minutes. It’s usually more like 45 minutes.
The web site is down 1 out of every 5 times I need to use it. The other times it is really slow and intermittent.
I can spend sometimes up to an hour to make a single payment as the web site takes so long to respond; The sessions timeout and I get the error’s detailed above.
Then you try to log back in and it wont let you because you already have an active session.
So you need to delete all your cookies and try again.
I manage the payments at my company and I think I can save about a day a month by transferring to another bank.
Luckily, we are in the process of doing this. I can’t wait.
My advice. DO NOT USE THE CO_OP. They are crap!