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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

First Direct Don't Think

I've been using First Direct to keep my Sun travel expenses separate from our family finances for many years. I can't say the experience has been that good, but today I was amazed by the weakness of their thinking. It's not the first time either; I am more & more likely to ditch them and go with Nationwide Building Society for everything.

Keeping in mind that they are a phone-and-web-only bank, you'd think that they would have great, flexible online presence. Think again. Their full service requires you to be running

Internet Explorer version 5.5 or 6 with ActiveX® enabled

I've lived with it up until now because my needs are simple and they also have a limited service that works in any browser. I've been using it with Safari on my Mac. Their labyrinthine security process involves a pair of numbers stored in a cookie to identify the account to the server; once identified, access is then with a password.

This is fine all the time you use the same browser, but switching browsers makes life hard since you don't have the cookie with you. So they are switching to a user ID/password system. Sounds good. To set it up you need to log in under the old system. This is where they screwed up.

See, the new system doesn't support Safari. It does, fortunately, support Firefox, but Firefox hasn't got the cookie with the magic numbers because that's in Safari. And they have taken down the old system, so there's no way to log in and set up the new user ID and password if you were a Safari user.

I called their call centre to get help. I hate calling call-centres, they always ask questions I have forgotten the answers to because I never call call-centres. That's why I use online banking, after all. As you can imagine, hold times are infinite because of all the people having log-in problems. Fortunately, a patient and charming agent was there to help me hack through to logging in, but the fact I had to do so at all shows their thinking is pretty poor. And I still can't use the full service because they require me to run Windows, IE and enable ActiveX in the browser, which I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy.

They have a history of screwing up like this, right back to when Unisys set up their first, appalling online banking system for them years ago with negligible thinking about end-user diversity. If you're thinking of getting an online bank, I suggest you don't pick First Direct. They want you to run Windows and IE after all. And with Active X. In other words, they are happy to make your life insecure for their convenience. Typical bank.

Labels: consumer

posted at 5:26 PM (UK) | Comment? (3 so far) | links to this post | |