Co-operative Bank business banking… broken again
Check out today’s error message from Co-op online business banking. It is amazing, it always seems to be broken when I need it. Either I am unlucky or it is broken a hell of a lot of the time:
Support Information
Error Number: 8516
Severity: E_MT_ERROR
Message: org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No
A delightful message to show your user. Sounds very much like the system is overrun. Which means either an inability to manage load/scale your system properly, or the system is falling over.
CORBA. Yes CORBA. Really. In 2008.
Co-op bank, I am sick of this, and sick of writing to you about this crap that you forced on us customers. Nothing changes. No announcements. No road map. No improvement.
I’m getting very close to registering co-op-online-business-banking-sucks.com and setting up a forum for people to air their complaints…
Co-operative Bank business banking disaster continues
It looks like the Co-operative Bank have upgraded their total disaster of a rework of their previously perfectly reliable business online banking service.
I can tell this because the UI has changed slightly, and more importantly pretty much any time I try to request a page i.e. do anything with the site I get this glorious error message:
That or the variant: "org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No"
First, we try not to laugh that they are still using CORBA. Then we laugh at the genius of the package name "org.omg" as in OH MY GOD. Then we cry that after what must be 3 years or so now, Co-Op bank has still utterly failed to turn this into an appealing and reliable online banking product, when they do so well on the personal banking site and use COMPLETELY DIFFERENT code it seems on the business side. Anyone heard of D.R.Y. at Co-Op Bank?
Online banking is about the least funny place to have I.T. clowns working instead of actual experts. Co-Op have been suckered by their IT managers, internal or external, and seem to remain blinded by them. Even the call centre staff know how bad this is, and its been going on for years.
Co-operative online banking I hate you so much
It’s a pet peeve of mine as some readers will know. The Co-op bank’s "Acumen" online banking system is a hideous retrograde step in usability compared to their old system. More features, less usability. Genius.
One of the most irritating things about it is that the session times out very quickly, and when it does so, it doesn’t tell you. You just start getting pages back from the server with the navigation menu but no body content.
What planet are these fools on?
Co-op online business banking dead… again
The farce continues. The new Co-op online business banking has been down for most of the weekend and still isnt fixed Monday morning. This is the second time in a few weeks where it has not been possible to even log in to the internet banking.
Plus all you get is the joyful error message:
Error: org.omg.CORBA.NO_PERMISSION: vmcid: 0x0 minor code: 0 completed: No (8516)
Mmmm. I know I said "new" online banking, and it uses CORBA. Obviously a slight contradiction there eh.
It is just unbelievable that the same company can produce a brilliant usable and very reliable personal online banking service, while producing an unfriendly and rather unreliable business service that appears to be a completely different code base. It smacks of incompetence.
At the very least re-use and DRY should even apply at the macro level were possible… i.e. "Hmm we have one great working online banking application… maybe we could erm… re-use and adapt it for the business service". But no… let’s write something new and buggy.
Co-op better sort this out VERY quickly or they are going to start haemorrhaging customers. Ethical banking is no good to anybody if the service is as poor as this.
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!
