Delivering Poor Banking Security

The DeliveryDemon has the rather naive expectation that banks who are entrusted with our money should operate reasonably secure procedures. Hang your heads in shame RBS and Barclays.

The DeliveryDemon has had cause to complain to both banks recently. In each case the complaint was about their processes, not anything specific to the account. In both cases an idiot from their customer ‘service’ team phoned up and demanded to know secure account access details before they would consider listening to the complaint. Do they really think it is sensible for someone to give out account password information to a random caller?

RBS, there is no need to access my account in order to hear that it does not constitute ‘faster payment’ if you take details of a payment on Friday and can’t process it till Tuesday unless the I ring again on Monday.

In fact there is no need for your customer ‘service’ to access my account at all. The default action should NEVER be to access the customer account. Basic security is that this should only be done if the customer raises a matter specific to the account, i.e. if there is a genuine need to access the account.

Banks are piling on nuisance value processes to make it more difficult for the customer to access their own money, all in the name of security. It’s about time they got their own house in order, introduced secure internal processes and gave their customer contact staff some basic security training.

Not Delivering Faster Payments

Since the bureaucrats took over RBS, the service has been going rapidly downhill, to the point that now they cannot even operate the faster payments system which banks should have been signed up to for several years.

The online service was never good, a classic example of security completely overwhelming usability. With public ownership, the phone service was drastically reduced. Then the ability to set up advance payments was cut back. The commonest requirement for advance payments is the ten month council tax cycle. It was once possible to set up 6 months worth of payments at a time, but that has been cut back to 3. Instead of 1 oppportunity to forget a payment, RBS has created 3.

The latest service cutback is the faster payments system, to which all banks are nominally committed. This system should, within certain limits, transfer money to the payee’s account within 2 hours. Not with RBS. The latest unintelligent development to their system cannot cope with a payment being set up on a Friday evening. It won’t do anything with it till the Tuesday. If the customer wants a payment to arrive on the Monday, they have to phone again on the Monday. In other words, RBS’s system cannot cope effectively with faster payments for nearly 3 days out of 7. The DeliveryDemon is seriously unimpressed with this constant erosion of customer service.

The gulf between the words ‘public’ and ‘service’ has never been wider. And it’s growing.

Banks need a foot in the real world

Who, running a small business, would be able to pay out bonuses if they were begging the bank to extend credit terms because the business wasn’t making enough money to balance the books?  The owner of a small business feels bad if he can’t reward hard working staff but he knows he has to return the business to a viable state before there’s money for bonuses. Why should things be different for a loss-making bank subsidised by the government? The priority should be to return the bank’s business to viability, not to to use the subsidy to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. If that means that hard working staff don’t get a bonus, so be it. After all, many hard working taxpayers in other sectors  face short working hours or redundancy, bank workers are not a special case.

If a government steps in to act as the bankers’ banker, the government has a duty to act as a responsible banker. The government should have a clear purpose in mind when it makes the loan and the purpose should be a condition of the loan. The government should know how to tell if that purpose is being fulfilled. And, given that the money comes from the public purse, the criteria should be visible to the public who fund the rescue package.

Why there’s a need for a Delivery Demon

DeliveryDemon believes that words and promises are all very well but in the real world you need to be sure that that there’s a significant probability that what’s been promised can actually be delivered. For example, if a government gives a shedload of taxpayers’ money to a bank to rescue it from failure, the government should have an understanding of what the bank needs to do, have an agreement with the bank that that’s what it will do with the money, and have a way of checking that what should be happening is actually happening. That’s one example, but in everyday life and business life, aspirations and promises are rife, and it’s risky to rely on them if there isn’t a visible path to delivery.

This blog share’s the Delivery Demon’s thoughts on delivery successes and failures.