> they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date
Guessing their clients aren’t banking via mobile apps, their staff having lines to their banker. Most top-tier private banks barely have an online presence. If you want something, you (or your assistant) calls or texts your banker.
Coutts has (in)famously gone through a digital transformation recently making talking to a personal banker exceedingly difficult. They are getting slaughtered on social media and on review sites for the change, because the new website and app are extraordinarily bad, even for a bank.
I seriously don't understand how websites with TREMENDOUS funding end up so bad. I have literally watched seniors in college, who three years prior did not know how to "int i = 1;", do senior design projects that put out what I'd call "standard bootstrap + rails websites" (which are fine! just specifying how EASY it is nowadays to make websites that don't suck) which are ridiculously superior to even any single page on most bank's websites.
Look, I'm a data engineer by day, I understand how bad UIs happen. I use Airflow, for God's sake, and heavily customized Airflow at that (where we've honestly only kind of roughly kept pace with the UI quality. like I said, I get how bad UIs happen).
But seriously. I try to be charitable. I can understand how page flows might be janky, how you might need a few redirects as they pass you through decades of legacy systems, etc.
But by God, there are some pages where I seriously cannot figure how they made that specific page, alone, in isolation so bad. The only thing I can come up with is they either a) contracted it out to someone who is literally not as capable as someone 2 years into a CS degree, or they've split the page among multiple teams who all wrote little scraps of HTML and JS and then some poor soul had to weld them all together and that's how it ended up.
Is it really just that they all hire huge incompetent contractors who "nobody ever got fired for hiring etc etc" and then they invariably fuck it up? I don't get how that doesn't get disrupted by either SaaS or just someone making a contracting shop that actually finishes projects correctly.
> senior design projects that put out what I'd call "standard bootstrap + rails websites" ... which are ridiculously superior to even any single page on most bank's websites.
Oh sweet summer child. You have not known the sharp pain of regulatory constraints, split stakeholder constraints, legacy enterprise constraints, COVID constraints. You know not of capacity planning, SOC2, or international banking law.
You have not known the one million lines of code repositories (PLURAL).
You do not see behind the summer rain. To the endless blizzard of business logic behind the frontend. To the third party vendors, evil so vast if it were written down the generations beyond could never forgive.
I've been in the industry nearly a decade and have indeed seen github enterprise repositories so large that github tells us we need to either split into smaller monorepos or stop using github enterprise and roll our own e.g. like google etc do.
I've exclusively worked in highly regulated industries - first a registered broker dealer where one of my (less favored) hats I wore was working directly with the SEC and FINRA handling inquiries, and the second being a large fintech company I don't want to be too specific about that dealt with a lot of banking and money movement regulations.
I'd appreciate it if you'd point your condescending prose elsewhere. I stand by my point. There's no reason some of the banking sites I've had to use should be so bad given their funding. If an ungraduated CS student can make their website not break chrome's credit card autocompletion, why can't enormous banks?
... who then hires the cheapest contractors they can find to do the work. The developers working on the $million sites may very well have far less app development experience than a 2nd year CS student. The CS student is also motivated to make a reasonable effort for good marks; the contractors know they will get paid, regardless of what crap they deliver.
In my former company we had a small software project to write a small driver for remote command execution on an embedded processor. Dealt with many senior managers on the internally outsourced SW side, and after months what we got was terrible. Buggy, inflexible, etc. It eventually came to a head and we had a meeting where the guy actually doing the work was called in. He was fresh out of college, and way over his head. Layers of management meetings, deadlines, pressure, testing by the HW teams, bug reports, etc. Never once did that team get more senior devs in to re architecht (or even architecht in the first place). In the end we dropped what they had and rewrote it in a few days, and we're HW guys.
Definitely true. I'm with a bank that feels like I might be their poorest client. They do have a nice app, but the real benefit to working with them is that I have a banker on standby that I can call or email for anything.
Wonder why a transaction was denied? Shoot an email with a screenshot. Want 500$ of Moroccan Dirhams for your next trip? Shoot a text and they'll put together a package + a few sweets for you to pick up when you stop by.
> Try to bank in Switzerland, it is so 1980ties...
What do you mean by that? In a way it's not retro enough (for me?), I currently have an account that can only be accessed via a mobile app (e.g. no website). See for instance https://www.neon-free.ch/en/
You can open an account fully online from your home, I don't think you even have to mail anything.
Fully agree with both you and parent. I'm in the process of switch from Credit Suisse to Neon.
Opening an account with Neon is the simplest thing ever.
I'm still on the phone weekly with CS to even attempt to make them do anything I've ordered them to.
Three weeks ago, they sent me a letter to confirm that my email address was authorized to make orders. I sent that back with the enclosed envelope. 4 days later, they called me to confirm my order. I did (verbally). They called back 10min later to confirm again. I confirmed again.
It has been two weeks since that phone call and the transfer has still not been completed.
There is quite a gap between the incumbents and “neo banks” in CH.
Neo banks are more modern and convenient but only compared to traditional banks within CH: spotty online bills support, no twint (or prepay twint), money transfers only occur once a day at 10am on banking days, customer service open from 9 to 5… Banks in CH are hilariously bad (and expensive), and it’s a shock because you always have this image that Switzerland banks must be amazing. Nope, far from it.
I feel like if I need customer service for basic banking services (as these banks are supposed to provide), I'm already at the wrong place.
For the rest I guess it's things I don't personally care about, so while it could be better (I have a EUR account for which my recipients get transfers within hours), I don't really notice it in practice.
I think it's becoming increasingly popular to only develop mobile apps: they are basically required at this point so no way to avoid the corresponding costs, while companies might save money on other entry points (physical, websites). Ideally you'll get some of these savings back via lower fees, but it definitely makes the loss or theft of a phone way more of a problem than it used to be.
The wealth management arm of a bank can simultaneously have managers with clients and sane online systems. Some people will want to do everything over the phone and/or in-person. Others will still want the personal touch while also wanting all the usual online access--possibly including mobile (though this tends to be less relevant with wealth management accounts).
Guessing their clients aren’t banking via mobile apps, their staff having lines to their banker. Most top-tier private banks barely have an online presence. If you want something, you (or your assistant) calls or texts your banker.