I recently started doing my banking online. You’d think, since I’ve been wired longer than almost any of my friends or family, that I’d be the first to do online banking. Well, I’ve done enough bank security assessments to feel more than a little trepidation at the prospect.

So, anyways, I’m doing my banking online. And were these online banking interfaces written by monkeys? Managing accounts, payees, and pending bills, is an amazingly complex process. If I don’t have a payee already in my list, why don’t you add it automatically, like every banking software on the planet? Or at least provide a link so that I can add one, rather than making me go through 4 menus to get there.

And here’s the one that I really like. When add a “business payee” it asks for the account number. What account number you might ask? Mine, or theirs? Well, that’s not clear. But if you go into the list where you can select a business payee from all the business payees that other customers have created, it appears that many of them thought it meant their account number. ’nuff said.

But, of course, the annoyances don’t end there. There’s no register view (ie, the list of payments that I’ve made that haven’t cleard yet) which means that I’m actually *more* prone to overdrawing than I was before, not less. This was one of the major motivators of doing this, so this is the one that annoys me the most.

The fact that everything is Java servlets and runs the speed of molasses uphill in the winter only serves to intensify my annoyance.

However, from talking with other folks, it seems clear that *most* online banking solutions are no better. *sigh*.