Tech 23 Apr 2007 11:45 am
HSBC breaks online banking
Read update on this post at the bottom
I do my day-to-day banking with HSBC (and I seem to be one of the few non-Asians doing so in Australia) because, to put it bluntly, it’s free: their basic transaction account has no monthly fee and no fee for transfers, and it allows a limited number of free withdrawals a month using other bank’s ATMs. And it even pays a decent (not great, but reasonable) interest rate on the balance. Adding to that, their online banking system works fairly well with any browser.
Or, at least, it used to. This weekend they unveiled a significant upgrade to their system, which had been announced for the last few weeks, and they seem very proud of it. Unfortunately, it only works in Internet Explorer. In Firefox, it simply does not work at all.
And it doesn’t fail gracefully, either. If you try to login using Firefox, after you type in your username and click on “continue” you get a blank screen. Nothing else. No error, no subtle failures, no garbage, not even a JavaScript error. And, because it manages to set a cookie before falling over, you can’t even go back: even trying to access the bank’s home page still gives you only a very blank screen (because it detects that you are in the process of logging in and tries to go forward with the process, I guess).
It would be bad enough if they had a legacy, old system that only worked in IE. But, in this day and age, to build a new application that does not work in other web browsers can’t be described as anything else other than laziness (or incompetence). Especially in Australia, which apparently leads the world in Firefox usage.
Perhaps it would be time to start shopping for a new bank. It’s a pity that there doesn’t seem to be that many no-fee options out there…
Update 02/05/2007: it now works perfectly well on Firefox. I’m not sure whether they fixed something, or whether the problems were actually caused by teething pains in the new system (of which they had more than a few). The e-mail I sent them about the problems received only an automated response. In any case, I’m happy now.
on 10 Jun 2007 at 12:17 pm 1.Gail said …
I echo your sentiments about HSBC online banking being good value compared to other local banks. I have, however, had my fair share of headaches when using the new, “upgraded” site. I use Firefox on an intel mac and since this upgrade have faced the same problems - but for me they still continue. I guess it depends what day you use it? I seem to always have trouble over a weekend… like today. And all I want to do is check my balance. I get nervous when I actually have to do a BPAY transaction because the site can be so unpredictable. I’ve called their customer service/tech support a couple of times in the past but haven’t gotten very far. In terms of other banks, I think Citibank may have a similar online banking product, but admittedly haven’t looked to closely into it.