OFT taking banks to court over unfair charges
Posted by Alex on Thu 26th July 2007
Bank charges scam-watch: Natwest pays out
In the latest of the virtually unbroken series of embarrassing defeats for banks being pursued through the courts by customers sick of being hit with penalty charges – decreed as “unlawful” by OFCOM – Natwest bank has repaid
Posted by Alex on Tue 17th April 2007
More proof that more money doesn’t equal more quality
I've written – no, ranted – before about how embarrassingly poor the Alliance and Leicester website is, when their badly-designed personal banking website managed to cost me a lot of money in penalty charges.
Checking my balance tonight (ok, I'm waiting for my student loan to come in so I can pay off some debts and, err, maybe spend some of it on a posh widescreen telly. Maybe…) I noticed an advert-style link at the bottom of the banking website. Apart from anything else, this position is one of the worst places to tuck important information as advert blindness tends to set in for anything placed in this part of a web page.
I'm a cynical git by nature – when I'm not off upsetting people, being embarrasingly drunk, or just being plain embarrassing – and decided to see what wonderous information the A&L were going to provide its customers that one can't already find out by reading any number of existing – and respected – websites (for example here, here, here, here … etc).
The first thing to annoy me when I clicked the link was that it opened a new window. Not a major issue for most people, maybe, but I consider it bad manners to start popping up new windows on your visitors' computers unless you have a very good reason to do so.
The second annoyance – and this is the point where I decided I had to write a ranty blog entry about this – was the completely gratuitous 2-step entry process – first I was shown a picture of a safe, with some text fading in and finally a “[click here to] enter” link appearing in the middle of the safe's combination dial thingy:
… followed by an equally gratuitous animation of the safe opening:
… and after a few seconds, you're presented with this completely Flash-based website:
Very pretty, lovely… Just one question – why has someone gone to all the trouble to pay – probably a lot of money – to have a Flash website developed to do this, when a plain, boring – but just as pretty – HTML website would have done *exactly* the same job, been a lot cheaper to develop and bug-test, loaded faster, provided a much higher level of accessibility and user friendliness, and would (eventually) have found it's way into the Google indexes??
However, I ought to balance this argument out a little – the information in the site isn't completely crap, although it's extremely basic and does little to help people make use of the myriad free anti-virus and anti-spyware tools available on the net. Oh, and there's also a link to the security centre on the A&L online banking log-in page:
The only problem? Clicking on the link in Safari does nothing – the HTML is all there, but it won't do nowt. The mouse cursor doesn't even change when you hover over the link. That might have something to do with the fact even this little web page has more than 30 code errors, according to the W3C validation service:
Good going, A&L ;o)
The thing that really disappoints me about all this is that, while paying undoubtedly huge sums of money to their web developers to do work which looks like the production work of a ten year old learning how to use Flash, A&L's customer service still leaves a lot to be desired – my heart goes out to anyone who has to enjoy the less-than-pleasurable experience of dealing with their Leeds-based call centre if you're trying to get a charge refunded, or cancel a direct debit.
… And, no, I'm not just pissed off because they took
Posted by Alex on Wed 11th April 2007
Bank Customer sends bailiffs into his bank…
I wrote a little while back about taking my bank to court. I've just read this story of a similar claimant – Declan Purcell – sending bailiffs into his local branch to seize the bank's property after the bank failed to refund his money despite winning against them in the courts.
I wonder if this like Real World 2.0 – where user-generated Web 2.0 content jumps into the Real World and bites the posterior of Big Business…? ;o)
/al
Posted by Alex on Wed 24th January 2007
Ever had a penalty charge from the bank?
(Off topic fun. Isn't it always these days?)
I've just been reminded by a friend that you can apply to reclaim any bank charges you've had in the last 6 years. For example, a direct debit for
Posted by Alex on Wed 22nd November 2006
Firefox users: beware Alliance & Leicester online banking
(Kind-of off-topic in a pixel-orientated way, not to mention long-winded, rambling and – arguably – pointless ;o).
Checking my bank account today to see if a transfer I'd arranged between a couple of my A&L accounts had cleared, I was more than a little confused to spot no sign of the transfer, and a mysteriously overdrawn third account.
Looking further into this, it turned out that my transfer – which should have gone from account A to B, had in fact been set up to go from account C (which didn't have enough money in) to B. Naturally, the transfer failed and account C had a
Posted by Alex on Tue 15th August 2006