St George Internet banking sucks
15 Feb 2006It requires Java. I can live with that, it’s a web application.
I had to call up to find out what browsers they officially supported, only to be told that support was limited to Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both platforms. Firefox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not particularly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.
The application sniffs for a Java Virtual Machine and refuses to load without even providing an error message if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explicitly and exclusively for the Sun virtual machine… so anyone who doesn’t use that platform for whatever reason (licensing, ethical, platform) — even if they have another fully compatible virtual machine — can’t get access.
My solution? Disable Java (not JavaScript) altogether using the Web Developer’s toolbar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.
There is absolutely no reason or excuse for this behaviour. If this fits into some perverted notion of security, I’m not comfortable having my money there. If it’s the product of an incompetent web team… well… they’re an incompetent web team. Grr.
I called up and asked why it wasn’t working, then explicitly asked for a report to be forwarded to the web team. Please lots of people do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account number during the phone call!)… this service is unneccessarily stupid at present!
On a plus side, their phone service is good fun. I couldn’t find a support number quickly, so I called the dragondirect number provided on a letter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “support”, I just hammered “9″ repeatedly. Works on a lot of PBX systems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 seconds, who then put me straight into the queue for web support. Good stuff.