St George
Current Services
Like many of the other banks, St George has a corporate site, with a range of additional services, but not presented as seamlessly as the ANZ site. For organisations wanting a Web presence, St George provides access to Business in a Box from Sausage software. Like the other major banks, St.George also has a corporate application for large companies.
St George provides the standard services including checking your balances, viewing your transactions, transfer funds between St.George accounts, and transfer funds to other nominated third party accounts. But this is a manual process as it requires you to nominate a payee on a form and send it into the bank, or call up the bank. Removing a payee is the same process. So unfortunately, there's no easy way to make an ad hoc payment to another person's account.
You can transfer up to AU$25 000 per day per customer, and set up future dated, or scheduled payments. You can do the same for groups of accounts, such as for payroll.
BPay and its history are available, and you can store payees and schedule transactions. It can also be used to pay for trades conducted through St.George Quicktrade.
You can access all your accounts including cheque, savings, personal/home loan and term deposit accounts. For the end of year books, you can also check how much interest has been earned on these accounts.
In a first, you can buy and redeem e-cash to spend over the Internet if you don't want to use your credit card.
Like the NAB, you can make term deposits by specifying the amount, and then searching for a suitable product. But you can't elect to pay interest to the new account to simplify rolling over the investment.
Future Directions
St.George didn't want to reveal too much about its future plans, but indicated that handling multiple signatures and read-only access for others are being reviewed, as well as other functionality.
Usability
The service was fairly slow, but you can download the Internet banking application to your hard disk to speed up access.
St.George has built an interface more like an application (it's written in Java, like the NAB), rather than a standard Web page, but the design doesn't take full advantage of the approach. As with other services, there are many redundancies in displaying details that could easily be simplified.
The display of transactions could be improved with a column for debits and one for credits. The credit card account doesn't show the limit, less charges, to give you the available credit.
When making a transfer between a savings account and credit card, a message is presented stating that payments may take up to one day, which is a little strange if you've got a bill to pay - and most people do it on the last day. Also an oversight is the lack of a Biller search - You need to know the number.
There is some customisation of the application, but it doesn't make it any easier.
The help text claims that exporting is available for quicken, money, and CSV, but we couldn't find it anywhere.
Macintosh customers are supported.
Conclusion
The application approach could make for a very strong offering, but there's a room for improvement. It does most of what you want, but the lack of support for ad hoc payments limits its usefulness.
Overall Rating 3.25 / 5.
A big problem delaying greater use of all forms of electronic banking is a valid distrust of banks. A number of times I have needed to change banks because the bank has discontinued a service, made a service uneconomic or broken their promise to me. Banks breaking their promises of a frequent problem. The managers who make offers and promises to you have no discretion to keep the promise when Head Office changes the rules.
When you have to change banks it creates big problems if you have organised direct payments into your account for dividend and investment receipts. Before you can change banks you have a huge list of people you have to advise your new account well in advance and then some are still going to go to the old account. In the end it is so much easier and safer to simply get paid by cheque and refuse the requests for direct payment.
What is needed is a reverse BPay where a payee can give payors a code. That code goes to a web table that I can update. Each time that someone has to make a payment to me they download the current bank details from that secure site. When I wish to change my bank I only have to change that one web table for all my payments to go to the new account.