Co-op Business banking – outcome of Radio 4 coverage is?

So Radio 4′s Money Box program was kind enough to interview me and broadcast some of the complaints myself and a great many others have about The Co-Operative Bank’s awful online business banking system.

The outcome of the program has been clear admission of the problems from John Hughes of The Co-op, news that the “completely new system” will be ready in Q2 2010, and that to improve the situation they’ve laid on an extra 20 call centre staff.

Apart from the admission – always nice to have – this is pitiful. 20 call center staff? How is that going to make online banking work for us over the next 6 months? Where were the hard facts? eg “The current system runs on N servers and that is simply not scalable for us, and we are moving to a system that we know will scale from A to at least B easily as we grow”. These are BASIC BASIC questions for an organisation like a bank to be able to answer.

Furthermore, there has been no mention of the “completely new system” already being repeatedly delayed – seemingly for years now. I and others were told many months ago that it was launching Oct/Nov 2009. Now its Q2/Spring 2010. What’s the betting we won’t see it in 2010 at all – after all these problems have existed for years now, why on earth is it taking so long?

What really irks me is that they are acknowledging the problem but giving no idea at all about who was responsible for the existing poor system, and who is putting together the new one. Presumably there was a massive management failure at Co-op when commissioning the previous system.

Are those managers still at the Co-op? Have they been retrained in scalable IT systems procurement?

Is the new team even fit to produce a high quality product? How can we as customers already neglected for years know that things will ever get better. The current system – we were told – was much better than the one before it. We customers beg to differ!

I looked at the board of directors of Co-op to see if we can contact them to write to them and explain that this repeated failure is going to kill their business banking business – and that they better be 10000% sure the new system is going to not only meet basic needs but actually wow us to restore the good faith we had.

However, there seems to be no Chief Technology Officer. In a bank, there is no CTO on the board of directors? Seriously? Is the problem actually that there is no coherent IT management right at the top of the bank’s board?

I’ve had a lot of new blog comments come in echoing the online banking problems with Co-op.

There’s also been some twitter coverage:

http://twitter.com/juxtabook/status/5762990782
http://twitter.com/jarneil/status/5738998022
http://twitter.com/MoeNawaz/status/5734085504
http://twitter.com/InterShortNews/status/5719050325
http://twitter.com/jain_sweden/status/5722958220
http://twitter.com/BBC_News_World/status/5712126686
http://twitter.com/paperfutures/status/5711227650
http://twitter.com/testandgo/status/5707893435

There were a lot more like this, presumably RT’s via BBC website.

At the end of the day, in my view this is a critical problem in the organisation. They pride themselves on ethics and a hence socially-minded outlook, making sure their staff are happy, and providing good customer service.

The problem is that somebody, once the Internet stuff started taking off, forgot that the Internet requires just this high level of customer service too, and you absolutely must put in the systems to guarantee this. Internet banking is not some 2nd-class add-on to phone banking. Well, it is at The Co-op for business customers.

I also notice people commenting that neither Smile nor personal Co-op online banking have seen any new features or improvements for years. This is absolutely true, and Co-op personal banking lags behind many other banks. We can’t search for payments/credits, we can’t filter by date ranges, we don’t have any way to set up automatic alerts/transfers under certain conditions.

Its stoneage

UPDATE: story picked up by ComputerWorld and says the new system we are yet to see is called Finacle and is from Infosys