Anonymous

Brussels

civil servant

At last someone is following up on this problem. My own experience with nat West Home bank is that it's a yapping dog of a site. Poor accessibility in this case means that it doesn't like my Mac and I couldn't log on most of the time without increasingly psychiatric sessions with their help desk. This assumes that one has not mislaid the three levels of password necessary to register and use the site, random bits of which have to be typed in to obtain access. I have not bothered to re-register since losing one or other component.

My knowledge of the less than highly competitive UK clearing bank market suggested that none of them would be much better so the hassle of changing banks would be hard to justify. This report confirms my suspicions.

If I contrast this with e-banking in Belgium, it's a different world. Instead of badly coded web sites with user-hostile security, transactions are prepared offline using a client software supplied by the bank, in Linux, Mac and Windows flavours. Update info passes through a Java module over an encrypted IP link to the bank's servers. This is easy, reliable and a pleasure to use. Well done ING and a tip of the cap to Kredietbank for getting it right.