For a number of weeks, St George's online banking customers have been suffering irregular Net banking services, including sporadic up-time, pages timing out and slow connectivity.
-Problems over the past couple of weeks are linked to future enhancements and improvements," St George corporate affairs manager Adam Cook told ZDNet Australia.
According to Cook, the bank chose not to take its online service down entirely whilst it upgraded the system with new facilities such as a third-party payee facility, the ability to edit your own contact details and an online account opening functionality. However, -the last thing we want is to put something out there that's faulty," he said.
According to Cook, the bank chose to test the new facilities - which have yet to be made accessible to customers - in a live environment, resulting in a bumpy ride for users.
Cook also admitted that St George's Net banking operations -ran out of capacity", resulting in slow Internet service, earlier this year. This was due to the exponential growth of Internet banking which has seen St George's online users grow from 220,000 in January 2001 to today's 360,000, Cook claims.
St George's new online banking facilities will be available to customers "very soon", according to Cook. -We want to stay ahead of the pack," he said.
As a system administrator for a privately-owned company I have little time for the type of rhetoric espoused by Adam Cook. As a new user of the St.George on-line facility I must say that at no point were we warned that we were setting up this service during a period of restructure. It is extremely difficult to train new users and maintain their enthusiasm for a new product if it fails to behave as promised.
Adam Cook's attitude seems to come more from a 'Banking' perspective rather than an I.T. one.
A case of "sit back & wait for us to get it right."
Given their huge resources and capital Banks (without exception) fail to use this power to leverage immediate results. Coming from a private company background I have absolutely no sympathy for the plight of these leeches.
Of course we receive no rebate for inconveniances caused and the best apology you will get is from the pre-recorded voice at the beginning of their help desk.
For the last month it would of been easier to physically go to the bank! Our previous on-line system (ANZ) was slow but infinitely more stable.
Perhaps Adam Cook should be asked why their developers did not/could not intergrate their program with Microsoft Dial-up Networking support. The technician that installed our service explained that all St. George E-commerce users must dial-up manually and then launch the program. At the time I laughed.... I am not laughing now!
If anyone can put me in contact with a consumer group re: on-line banking please forward the relevant details to sysadmin@smouha.com
Pick up your game St. George!