Citibank
Current Services
Citibank's service, called CitiDirect, impressed us with its ease of getting started. You just have to enter your card number, and then your ATM PIN. That's it, and you're doing your banking. The service was updated in September.
However, that's where its strengths ended. Like most of the other banks, CitiDirect allows you to do the usual things like statements, transferring funds between your own, and to other accounts. You can transfer funds to accounts in other banks, and use BPay for your bills. And if you have regular payments to make, you can set up 'standing orders', though we think they should have called them 'scheduled payments'.
If you have your own finance package, you can download your information to Quicken and Microsoft Money. For other packages, you can download in OFX (Open Financial Exchange) and CSV (Comma Separated Values) formats.
For SMEs with international requirements, you can, in what appears to be unique to online banking, transfer funds to other countries. However, this is actually done through a manual process, where a bank staff member manually performs the transfer for you. You can also order bank drafts and cheques.
Like all the other banks, you can send secure e-mails and order chequebooks, statements, as well as change your PIN and contact details online.
Future Services
Citibank declined to provide any indication of its future directions with its online offering.
Usability
Unfortunately, compared with the other banks, the usability and simplicity of Citibank was the lowest of the group. Many of the transactions take three or four steps to complete, instead of one or two.
In the accounts area, there is an unnecessary separation of Account Details form Account Activity (meaning transactions), which could all be integrated. Individual account activities are not clearly marked as deposits or withdrawals so it's hard to tell how your spending is going.
If you want to check standing orders, this takes three clicks instead of one. To transfer money to another account, you have to set the recipient up similar to a BPay biller, instead of just entering the account and BSB. When paying Bpay, or making other transfers, adding new billers is separated from paying bills, making it a slower process for the first time, and there is no support for ad hoc transactions.
The service also had numerous compatibility problems with Netscape, which either freezes or misses information. The environment looked as though it hadn't been tested for either bugs or usability. Printing was also quite unattractive, being done in Courier font, with no bank branding.
For the expert customer, this level of redundancy could soon become a slow process, and the non-standard terms don't help.
Conclusion
This site lacks a lot of polish. If you're serious about Internet banking, then take a look around at the other offerings first. It's a shame the simplicity of getting online wasn't supported in the actual package.
Overall Rating: 2 / 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.