L-P Huberdeau's blog

This is getting totally absurd. A few weeks ago, I decided to open a bank account in a different bank because I considered my current one was not able to offer the service quality I expected. As in, not able to answer simple questions about my finances. The whole transition just gives me the feeling I should really run away from them, and fast. For the moment, this is quite hard because they still have my money.

In the whole process, I made one big error. I expected things to be simple. I have been doing all my transactions electronically for the past few years. I expected that making a transfer would be a few clicks away. The have been running an ads campain about online person-to-person transfers for the past year or so. According to the publicity, all you need to do is enable the service. Sounds good to me. I liked the idea of keeping things flexible and keeping the account open for a little while, just in case (you never know, bankers in the other bank might just be worst). So I went to the bank to enable the service. I had to pull out my investments anyway, so I had to be there physically anyway. Pulling out the investments actually worked. But for their service, it was only available between their clients. Smart. But they had an other service for “inter-institution” transfers. So I requested to get that enabled, they told me it could take a few days. Fine.

A few days later, I check online to transfer some funds. The service is not enabled yet. It seems like it takes up to 7 days. If not enabled after that period, I need to call them. I waited a few more days and called them. It seemed like I didn’t send in the required paperwork. No one ever asked me to fill in more paperwork! I signed an agreement and gave the account information to the person in front of me. How could anything be missing. I didn’t do anything.

So I go back to the bank, again. Explain the situation with the request stuck pending and the missing paperwork. They must have asked everyone in the office to know what was going on. No one knew, so they ended up calling some remote office. The problem was that the person who served me forgot to fax the cheque sample for activation. This sounded weird to me. Why a cheque sample? The cheque number was typed in. Why would you need any more information? I suspected they had some cheque number verification authority to make sure I was not making transfers to the wrong account. They told me it would take 24 to 48 hours to activate. Better than a week, but over two weeks elapsed already since the original request. No other option there. Their procedures say so.

A few hours later. I receive a call at home. They are still missing information. I was pissed. Seriously. I started asking why they needed all this. I mean, all I want is to transfer money from account A to account B. Why do they need to validate that account B is really mine? If I decide to push money into someone else’s account, it’s my problem (or generosity). Now I had the most stunning answer I ever had. The service I had been waiting for all that time only allows to transfer from B to A, so they need to verify my identity to make sure they don’t take money from a random account. Why would I want such a service? Why would I ask my bank to pull money from my account in the other bank?

All this time wasted. They don’t even know the services they offer. And as if it wasn’t enough, they called me a few minutes ago to sell insurance.

As a software developper, I got to ask myself how could a system end up being so useless. Why would such a feature be requested? It’s simply backwards. I’ve been trying to find a use case for it. There is none for a client. Well, not unless there is such a set-up on both ends and you can actually think about going to the opposite interface to request a transfer. The service works the way banks work internally to handle cheques. They receive a piece of paper and call the other institution to ask a transfer. It makes sense when dealing with paper you carry around, but we’re talking about a software here. I bet it was easy to implement.

I will have to visit them again tomorrow to try to solve this problem. Soon, I’ll have to bill them for wasting my time.