What's the worst feature of your legacy bank?

Mine is that I have to take a days annual holiday from work just to visit a branch, due to the lack of them and because of their lame opening hours.

I know Monzo doesn’t have any “branches” but I was able to pay a check in this week by dropping it in the post. Something I can’t do with my current bank.

Oh… and their app is pants :smiley:

What is the worst feature of your legacy bank?

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The lame website that doesn’t include any recent transactions and so gives a balance that is vaguely related to reality but not useful.

An app that is so bad I uninstalled it… clearly written by an intern in about 5 minutes.

Despite regularly stopping cards for ‘fraud protection’, completely missing actual fraud.

The total lack of feedback… with monzo I know what’s coming next, what goes wrong, how they’re going to fix it… legacy bank? The extent of their communication has been a pointless letter telling me I didn’t pay any bank charges last year.

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The crappy app. :):sweat_smile:

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The fact my personal loan doesn’t appear in the app, and I can’t overpay it simply by transferring money across within the app. (I know it’s possible, because a previous loan at a different institution provided just that. It was only a low interest rate that sold me.)

The various security nonsense. Entering only some digits of the internet banking pass number, “voice authentication” by phone (courtesy of HSBC), etc. What’s wrong with a strong password I can just let my password manager remember for me?

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Their revamped security for logging into the website (looking at you smile!) I now need to remember three unique identifiers to log on. Because I mostly use Monzo now I invariably forget one which means I need to reset my account every time I log on.

Resetting my account of course involves digging out the wee calculator security thing, and finding a card to use in it…

Partner got his pin wrong too many times (actually he didn’t, but that’s another issue). So he had to wait several.days for a new pin to be sent out in the post.

Legacy banks suck

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Randomly flagging certain (esp overseas) online transactions as fraudulent, while still missing the actual fraudulent transactions. A++ :roll_eyes:

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The mishmash of channels - it seems the branch is their preference to be interacted with but they’re shutting them all so it is confusing as to how you’re meant to interact with them and frustrating when it doesn’t make sense.

In 2017 I would expect online chat to be the main channel. Not just because monzo does it - it has been used by companies for customer service for at least 10 years and it’s always been so much less painful than all the other methods, but banks never embraced it for “security”.

Just to change my address at a high street bank I had to search online for forms. I don’t have a printer so called to see if I can do it over the phone but they said just go into the branch with the form and we can do this for you. Live in central London but had to get a bus as they shut the branch within walking distance, stop off at Internet cafe to print the form and fill it in, get to branch and queued for about 15 minutes with only 2 people ahead of me, you know the queue during quiet periods where there are 3 or 4 staff doing some sort of banking or milling around behind the screen but only 1 window open to customers and the ones in front are depositing their life savings in pennies? Get to the front and the guy just types it onto the computer and adds the new address in a few seconds, no check of address or anything, so what was the point of sending me to the branch? :frowning: it is so frustrating. That was with Halifax.

I told NatWest I want to close my account and this was the discussion https://twitter.com/natwest_help/status/866934397462859776 I still have a NatWest account because they shut the branch near me and they insist I go to a branch to close my dormant account. They are going to be sending me summaries in the post for many more years saying you have 0p in your account. I have banked with most of them and they are all the same big unfunny joke. I cannot wait till monzo or whoever comes along and takes out the trash.

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for me it was being charged £20-25 for a SEPA transaction whereas Handelsbanken charge 20p. Any challenger bank needs to charge about £1-2 for this service

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One bank I was with point blank refused to close an account because there was a ‘stuck’ transaction despite no money in the account and no actual transactions for ages.

I’ve probably still got it, but it’ll be registered to about 3 addresses ago…

That was also the bank that managed to set the overdraft limit on an account to a negative number, so they started charging overdraft fees when there was plenty of money in the account. Branch staff refused to believe that this was a problem or error on their part, and it required a written complaint to head office to fix it.

They do prefer you deal with the branch, but give the branch staff no power to fix anything… and they just say to call them, and the call centres say you have to go to the branch. It’s all designed to make most people give up and accept their fate.

I’ve yet to have to deal with Monzo on that level but by all accounts won’t have any problems like that.

Oh and an honorary mention to Nat West who after their well known ‘trendy wine bar’ campaign claiming they were opening new branches not closing them have just closed the last branch for miles.

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I know about Natwest as I had to go in branch and close my account. Rang them and asked and was told no other way.

Metrobank recently changed password form, before it was full password + 3 randomly selected digits from secondary password. I could set full password to 16 chars, maybe they even accept more, but I had to retype if from generator into wobbly tablet in branch, so I didn’t go for 30 chars. I could accept that 3 random digits from secondary password are a pain and that I had to copy paste main password…

But now it bloody looks like this:
image
It takes me about 1 minute to carefully log in, alt tabbing between website and password manager

I’m not even sure how they are hashing it, if they can compare particular digits… They hashed each character separately with some salt? They generated a ton of 3 char combinations from 16 character password and salt+hashed each? I don’t think they can use HSM for it? :thinking:

Natwest has same approach, I believe? I’m considering going back to Barclays because of this… But they had calculator thingy!

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I think a mixture of security number / password (choosing the 1st 5th 7th, etc. randomly… :-1:) and having to use the calculator for everything!! It’s mental haha :slight_smile:

Going to be super happy moving to Monzo, so far they’re doing quite well, even with their lack of an app lock :wink:

Not being able to setup a new payee on my mobile too!! Very irritating when trying to send friends / colleagues money just as a one off :confused:

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  1. Not being able to set up a payment through the app.
    I closed a bank account way back in 2010, confirmation letter - bank taken over same year.
    Still shows on my credit report despite trying to get it removed.
    Account shows as open - I have no sort code or account number and the current bank can’t find me.
    That’s why I hate Legacy banks and have no loyalty to any of the rip off b******ds.
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There are links in the website that appear to let you instantly do things but actually result in an email being sent to customer services in the background, through their awful internal messaging system and then an inevitable delay of a few working days for it to be processed.

A CSR then responds as if you personally wrote the automated generated message and it’s super weird because they’ll thank you for writing in to customer services … when you didn’t.


Other thing I had to deal with repeatedly was paying for services abroad. I have a VPS in the states that I pay for every month - same company, same amount. They randomly started flagging this up and blocking the card completely. I wouldn’t find out about this until I received a letter (?!) and so I’d commonly just be stuck because the card didn’t work. I’d phone up, complain that it was completely genuine and the exact same thing would happen next month :angry:

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I didn’t find out either that my transactions were flagged until I got a letter! And on the letter they told me to call to sort it out and I tried but gave up… there should be push notifications or an email for this sort of thing

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Trying to log in on my mobile but missing the Touch ID window because I’ve been distracted (child, pet, what ever) then being asked to give 3 numbers from my online pin that I never use because I never login using the online desktop version if I can help it, then being told by my phone I need to find the calculator security thingy and my card to change the number online. All of this could easily be sorted by having the option to press something to allow you to go back to Touch ID but no, Nationwide wouldn’t do something so simple… just like they can’t tell me what my pending transactions are or let me setup a SO or new payment unless I’m using the desktop version of the banking app. I have 5 (yes 5) of the security calculator thingys dotted around my house and work cos you just don’t know when your going to be locked out of your account and need to use one to get back in. Complete palaver doing anything online with my bank

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I’m going to turn this question around: What is the best feature of your legacy bank:

  1. Being able to speak to human beings either over the phone or in-branch (Monza, Revolut etc - I’m looking at your in-app chats).

  2. Having the full set of banking facilities (direct debits, standing orders, international payments, SEPA transfers etc - this time I’m looking at Fidor. I’ll wait to see how it pans out with Monzo).

  3. Having a website where I can do my online banking. I trust my computer; I know what is on it and I know that it is safe. I see some people here are putting their faith in apps that they have no idea how they work, what other permissions they require etc or even how safe their underlying phone OS is. Android has the largest number of malware-ridden apps.

The point I’m trying to (badly) make is that not everyone has a mobile phone or wants to tie their entire financial live to a phone. Lose you phone, run out of charge, find yourself in a not-spot etc and you’re f**ked as far as Monzo, Revolut etc are concerned. I can happily do my online banking with a computer and I certainly don’t want to be tied to a mobile.

Until ALL banks offer the same security and methods of accessing your account then none of them will be perfect. Until then I’ll be sticking with the tried, tested and trusted “legacy” banks for my day-to-day financial life.

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If you close the Nationwide app (quick double-press of the Home button and swipe away the app) and relaunch you are presented with the Touch ID option again.

My only major complaint with Nationwide is the excessive downtime. Not a month goes by without the app/Internet banking being taken down for several hours of “planned maintenance”. This often slips into extended downtime (a couple of weeks ago Nationwide was down for more than 24 hours).

Hopefully Monzo’s microservices architecture will keep their down time to a minimum (although it looks likely i won’t be able to get a current account due to restrictive ID requirements).

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From what I’ve read on other threads Monzo will go the extra mile for you and find different ways to vefify you if you don’t have a passport or drivers license.

The CEO has previously spoken about how a goal of his is to solve the problem of people around the world being unbanked because of restrictive KYC or whatever reasons, so I would be pretty shocked if you were told to do one because of not having their ID of choice.

Not sure how good the solutions are at this very early stage but you will certainly be met with more open mindedness and desire to improve. If monzo can’t verify you and you are clearly a real person they will feel they have work to do to make it right, whereas if you go into (insert name of hundreds of years old bank) not having these 2 documents is clearly your fault, the MS DOS computer says no and you may leave wondering if you are even a real person :worried:

Definitely worth hitting them up in the chat when you get the current account invitation.

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