99% of customers won’t care.
Most people don’t care about the marketing or branding of a company, but companies still spend a lot of money on it. Brand image does matter, even if most people don’t show any care towards it.
I wasn’t particularly impressed, tbh. Trying too hard to be like fintechs and not succeeding. Silent (aargh) notifications that only work with debit card transactions, pretty pointless ability to add TransUnion credit score monitoring and something odd about the way transactions were processed and how or when they appeared in the account register.
I CASSed it to get a switching bribe in the end and I doubt I’ll be going back to them.
“Trying to hard to be like fintechs”. Isn’t that a good thing? Bringing in new features? If pretty pointless features are a bad thing, I think you can say the same about quite a lot of Monzo’s features.
Oh no the card ![]()
not seen mine in months, it’s in the bottom of a drawer.
I’ve found different, in honesty. The notifications are getting better, I don’t personally care if they are silent so long as I get them and the app design is really coming along.
Yeah I think they are improving in this area, but I agree it would be better for them to show up on the date (even if they have to show as pending somehow) rather than on a separate list.
The fact you can have the app on two different devices is really good too and the iPad App is actually nice to see as native, rather than a “scaled” iPhone version
Yes, that’s laudable, but you missed the “not succeeding” bit (IMO, of course).
Well there’s always RBS - the same app, but a pleasing beach hut card design!
RBS customers can use NatWest branches too.
I never even noticed that, I keep my phone in silent mode almost 100% of the time. I find notification sounds too intrusive and, since I got an Apple Watch, I need them even less.
I agree with that sentiment!
I can see that, yes, and I does seem like 80s style is coming back a bit in general. I find the card OK, but don’t exactly like it.
This
and this
are due to their old-fashioned bank mainframe processing which would be very difficult to change, so they are simply trying to “hide” it instead. This article, from their banking platform meltdown 10 years ago, describes how it works in simple terms:
More detail is here:
Ah, yes, that rings a bell. In fact, I think some of my colleagues used that Nat West t*ts up when there were rumours of our IT jobs being outsourced. Fortunately, it never happened to us, but we did get additional staff from India to help out with various projects and they were of an extremely high standard.
Yeah, the outsourcing thing was part of the backdrop in this case but really the system was just flaky and it could equally have happened to an IT team here.
I mean, they installed the update to CA7 correctly but the update itself was buggy so they had to “back out” of it. That’s where everything then started to go wrong. It is quite incredible that they manually process the day’s transactions, every day, in this way. When you think about it there is huge scope for things to go wrong! Of course, it made sense in the 1960s when no instant transactions were ever made, but it really doesn’t make sense now.
The whole idea of Bó, really, was to test and develop the technology they could use to move away from this but in the end it was thought to be just too difficult to move off the mainframe and too costly to start from scratch with a new platform.
Not just the 60s. I worked for a City Council in the 80s and the whole rates and rate rebates system was still one of all the changes being hand-written onto forms, then inputted by data entry clerks before being batch-processed overnight.
Could’ve been worse I suppose. I mean, look at what happened to Knight capital ![]()
Annoyingly I deleted my pin number for my credit card from secure storage as I thought I’d been to the machine to change the pin. ![]()
Nope didn’t do that ![]()
Can’t view the pin in app so had to request a postal reminder
hopefully they’ll add that in soon, for morons like me
Yes, I too was surprised when I went for a PIN reminder for my new card and found I could only get that via Post. How very 1996.
I don’t remember being asked anything like that…
Are you setting up a whole current account?
They’ll be tightening their belts ahead of FCA rulings / criticisms. Fortunately any questions about loans / savings etc are easy enough to answer.
Would suspect after the recent kicking they got about KYC, processes have changed slightly to ask more.
Ah that might be why. I did mine years and years back in branch. Just prove who I am and it was opened.
At what stage does it ask all this, before or after the ID checks / video check
I literally went through the sign up, inputting fake details right up until the please upload ID bit. At no point did it ask me anything like what it’s asked you
dunno what’s up there then