In general, banks compete on other attributes - a small difference in a mortgage interest rate is a lot of money and makes up for a HUGE difference in the quality of internet services; and whenever loan market becomes tight (and thus it's not attractive to refinance to another bank) people are pretty much locked in.
Exactly this. They're not great, but there's something about being a customer somewhere for a very long time that genuinely does (or did) seem to offer you a mortgage rate that was advantageous.
I'm surprised to hear UK banks value loyalty. It's certainly not my experience.
Sadly far too often managers and decisionmakers think timeline and deadlines is a topic for haggle, not discussion. They treat it same as haggling on a bazaar.
In many cases it can be though. If I'm asked for an estimate to do X and I say I can deliver in three weeks, and my boss says customer needs it for golive in three days, I'll try to find some way of making that work. Perhaps they can live without a full solution for the first few weeks, instead requiring only a subset of the requirements in that period. Or, if I insist it just cannot be done, I'll tell the boss who'l…
That's a discussion. Not haggling.
Demanding the same for less is haggling. As if we can magic time reductions out of our asses without cutting features .
Businesses can change, too. My credit union[1] recently made a web site change causing me to no longer be able to log in. The new shiny red login button they probably paid $millions for an incompetent developer to provide does nothing when you click it (desktop Safari). I vetted the old site which worked perfectly, but now it doesn’t. I’m working on moving my business elsewhere. 1: https://www.techcu.com/
Hopefully they didn't pay $millions...the source is completely unminified, it checks a cookie, calls Google Analytics, then changes the login link from display:none to display:block. function LoginButtonClick() { var selAccount = $("#accounts").val(); LoginCookieSet(selAccount); if (typeof ga !== 'undefined') ga('techcu.send', 'event', 'button', 'Click', 'Member Login'); var formAction = "https://online.techcu.com/Us…
Nice debugging and thanks! Didn't expect someone to actually dive in and figure it out. I'll bookmark the direct link to hold me over until I find a new bank but I've already totally lost confidence in the business. They can't even be assed to test their main web site. I wonder if they see the failure from analyzing the before-and-after browser share in their logs. I wonder if anyone's even monitoring the logs.
> such as moving everyone over in one go. It's the core banking system of a big bank. Handling consistent state between the old and new systems while progressively migrating customers would probably have been extremely complex. They also get to have a maintenance window (few people will complain if they get warned their bank and all transactions won't work for 2 hours in the middle of the night on Monday). A "big ban…
> A "big bang" migration makes more sense, if everything is properly prepared and tested, which it wasn't. That sounds like ‘A “big bang” migration makes more sense, if it works.’ Your rollback plan should never be an afterthought. Your rollback plan should be designed like you expect to use it. If your rollback plan is “Burn the ships” and fix-forward, you shouldn’t be working at a bank.
Definitely been the plan at a variety of places I've worked. Including a bank.
I have a bank account with TSB and got compensation as a result of this mix-up. Some rather personal experiences of the fiasco: – Rather pointlessly, the website changed from being mostly static to entirely written in a very JS-heavy, "dynamic" way. I still can't use it in my normal browser (FF) with its extensions because it relies heavily upon CORS requests and referrer information that my somewhat privacy-paranoid…
How did you get compensation? Thank goodness for monzo and revolut being so quick to set up but I had money trapped in TSB for some time. I thought it would only last a day or two at most. The services and ability to get support were non-existent during that time I totally stopped trying to call. I closed my TSB account shortly after
I went in-store to get money out in person, mentioned the problems and very nicely got handed details of how to complain. I did so, with screenshots, and got something like £150 -- completely unrequested -- in my account about six months later. I think they handled the whole thing very well actually, although I'd probably feel different if I had gone into mortgage arrears because of it, as I understand some customers did...
I will always remember this incident as the time when the UK general public were exposed, en masse, to Spring error messages. The confusion caused by ordering a member of the general public not to request a bean from a bean factory in a destroy method implementation still makes me laugh, even now.
I really hope my bank runs cobol rather than any of this spring bean junk.
As a privacy-aware user, when making a contract with a bank (or buying a flight ticket or whatever) you should get assertions that their web site meets certain quality standards so you can use your browser to access the account or actually check in. Paper did not have those incompatibility problems... However, from the BBC article I conclude that even customers with a default browser could not necessarily use their a…
Businesses can change, too. My credit union[1] recently made a web site change causing me to no longer be able to log in. The new shiny red login button they probably paid $millions for an incompetent developer to provide does nothing when you click it (desktop Safari). I vetted the old site which worked perfectly, but now it doesn’t. I’m working on moving my business elsewhere. 1: https://www.techcu.com/
Yes, they can change. But if technical compatibility were part of your contract they might end up paying damages if they break it. Well, I am dreaming...
2008: "The UK-based IT department of the fifth largest bank continues to dwindle as more jobs go overseas... This round of cuts, starting in June and lasting 12 months, involves up to 250 permanent IT roles and 200 contractors from the bank's technical delivery division, responsible for software development and design." [1] 2018: "Timeline of trouble: how the TSB IT meltdown unfolded". [2] It's probably more complica…
That probably has very little to do with it. The immediate cause of all the problems was that Lloyds TSB was forcibly split up in order to try and increase competition and the Lloyds half kept the IT department, and when the TSB half tried to move over to the existing IT platform of their new parent company everything broke.
It's funny how there's always a cheap offshored bodyshop involved in these stories yet it's never their fault. Cue in the 9$/hour indian coders working for Boeing.
Here's the thing I've learned over the years: Never touch offshored code. Always go for a complete re-write. Don't add features to it, don't refactor it, don't extend it. Just re-write. In my experience it's the best approach.
I know guys who made it their whole business to go and completely re-write projects from scratch after offshoring efforts failed.
> – The online browser-based system was telemetry and JS heavy, replacing a far leaner page I remember one of those banks using the "leaner" page also had heavy telemetry turned on at some point. I type very fast, so I noticed that when I was entering my user id, it was lagging heavily. Then I turned on developer tools only to see that they were logging all keystrokes to analytics. Including username and password. At…
Report that to the regulators. If you're in the US I know for a fact the regulators listen to and review complaints. https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/credit_12666.htm
You can also report serious problems to FinCEN and the OCC
I will always remember this incident as the time when the UK general public were exposed, en masse, to Spring error messages. The confusion caused by ordering a member of the general public not to request a bean from a bean factory in a destroy method implementation still makes me laugh, even now.
If I cant raise a specific exception or its in a block of code I dont expect an error I generally make the exception memorable or dangerous sounding just so the user is more inclined to report it (hopefully not via a tweet tho)