Black Friday? More like Blackout Friday for HSBC's online and mobile banking HSBC's online and mobile banking systems crashed spectacularly this morning on the busiest shopping day of the year, potentially disappointing early risers looking for a spot of Black Friday retail therapy. Thousands of people across Britain began reporting connectivity woes on Down Detector from near 0700 local time and those …
I haven't used (or seen) a cheque in at least a decade.
My last three employers (covering 15 years or so of my dealing with their accounting systems) who take in millions of pounds a year started refusing cheques 15-20 years ago.
I don't think there's a high-street bank left who issue cheques to account holders any more.
I received a cheque in the post this morning, and deposited another in a bank last week.
The belief that something isn't important and can be ditched because someone doesn't personally require it or use it is what led to Brexit seeming like a plan to millions of people who knew absolutely zip about economics. That shaved 25% off sterling and gave the UK third world inflation, undermined the labour market and half emptied supermarket shelves.
gave the UK third world inflation
Tell me you're clueless without telling me you're clueless.
The UK has had nothing like "third world inflation". Some such countries experienced 3 and in rare cases, 4 digit inflation!
Turkey isn't a third world country and had, what, 8 times our inflation rate recently? Germany, Italy and Spain have been in the 8+% territory not too long ago. They certainly aren't third world countries.
Think your 25% is a bit wide of the mark.
The exchange value of the pound has been falling steadily for at least 2 decades, and the fall after the brexit vote was almost entirely due to the rabidly remainer governor of the BoE slashing already artificially low interest rates to almost zero to force the pound to fall. It was his determination to prove that his assertion that the pound would collapse if the vote went in the leave direction that caused the drop at that point, and even then it didn't actually drop by that much (and subsequently recovered most of that drop) - over the last 10 years the value of the pound versus the Euro has only dropped by <4%, but has dropped by 22% against the dollar, which should make clear the extent to which the Euro has also fallen (nearly 20% to save you the need to look for the information).(source xe.com)
Puts the remainer myth that leaving the EU is anything to do with the root cause of the pound's long term slide into a bit of perspective. The Euro has been dropping almost as rapidly.
Thanks in advance for the downvotes! As always, they won't change reality.
"Compensation time methinks," said one. "Train companies compensate when a train is an hour late… what about for thousands of customers who have important bills to pay/ transactions to do/ work and lives to live and need their banking app!"
Just vote with your feet, man.
I have moved away from every major UK high street bank at one time or another.
NatWest - when they pretended that a Java applet in an HTTP page was "secure" just because it showed a padlock, rather than deploy HTTPS.
HSBC - when they laughed in my face when I applied for a mortgage, so I went next-door to a mortgage shop and got... the exact mortgage I was asking for, no hassle. Also when they overcharged me for a cheque that they DELIBERATELY delayed paying in - in ten years of custom, the ONE cheque that could, in theory, be processed for 48 hours for which the last 10 minutes would incur a fee... that one delayed exactly 48 hours and incurred a fee. None of the thousands I'd paid in before over a decade did so, no delay, nor fee, not once.
Barclays - when they insisted on causing me nothing but hassle when it came to paying in my (Barclays Bank!) university grant cheque into the university branch of Barclays Bank that they opened for me for that express purpose.
...
and so on.
I now deal only with online-only banks (not FirstDirect!) because they have to give me the functions I want to use. And because they have no branches to staff, I get functions to do EVERYTHING I need (open a business account, a joint account, dispute a transaction, etc.) in the app itself.
Sorry, but a bank should not be "down" online nowadays. I can understand "Oh, sorry, we're just pausing scheduled payments for a little while" or "Your balance info may be up to date by up to an hour while we process a backlog", etc. but they shouldn't be DOWN. I should still be able to make payments, get to my account, etc. Anything else is a complete failure to deploy enough redundancy.
Which, weirdly, the online-only banks with only one thousandth of the same resources seem to manage no problem at all.
And the train analogy is very apt. When I started to realise that trains were so unreliable I couldn't use them, I just... stopped using trains entirely. That was many years ago and apart from very rare, non-critical, mid-day journeys into London for leisure (with plenty of backup options), I just never use them.
"Oh, the trains/banks are terrible" people say, as they reward them with thousands upon thousands of pounds year after year despite being terrible.
I'd really rather be inconvenienced on my own terms and at my own expense than give such places my money.
A bit like my electricity supplier at the moment. They decided to take the mick, they still are taking the mick, so I'm investing gradually in making them obsolete for my purposes - even if it costs me more in the long run. Each month my grid usage goes down. Each month they vastly over-estimate unless I put in a meter reading on the 31st. So each month I put in a meter reading on the 31st, apply for a refund for ANY overpayment, and use all such overpayments to buy more off-grid electricity equipment, which means my next bill is even lower again....
And I made my water supplier fit a water meter. My water bill dropped to 10% of what it was when I did so. Rest assured that if I ever find a practical way to reduce my water usage further, I'm doing it. I'm literally eyeing up a £1000 automatic greywater header-tank system. I'd rather pay £1000 to make them redundant than give them even £100.
Vote with your feet, people.
Our broker saved us from a complete Trussing because they were proactive about arranging the remortgage, even before I'd thought about it at all.
Of course, the trouble with hiring a specialist is that it's very difficult to tell if they're any good. I did get utterly screwed over by an incompetent planning consultant giving extremely bad advice.
Because being a long term personal and business customer, I wasn't expecting to be literally LAUGHED AT when I applied for a mortgage from a well-established business partner (that's what a bank is) and long-term personal banking provider.
I would happily go to a more expensive provider that I have a relationship with than go with the cheapest.
But established relations were destroyed in one meeting with them, for a totally without-cause refusal (as proven by a mortgage shop being quite prepared to give me one and couldn't understand what the problem was given my credit record, business income, employment, etc.).
My account was closed within a few months of that, especially given the other incident, and as soon as I could move everything away from them.
We chose HSBC as the best choice when moving between Canada and France. Over the course of 18 months we spent literally hundreds of hours on the phone, being disconnected on the phone, and hanging up the phone because the low paid Asian call center drone was incomprehensible.
They are, without question, the most technologically inept company I've dealt with.
I now bank with the decidedly tiny Lahave River Credit Union, where I can even phone the branch directly and talk to a real person.
HSBC is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. I got rid of my HSBC account 10 years ago (wasn't a walk in the park BTW).
The Controversies section of the wikipedia page is full of notable events: money laundering, Forex, Libor, Euribor, Tax avoidance, various frauds, racism, sanctions evasions. You name it. It's all there.
I've banked with HSBC for over 25 years. Of course that includes a good portion of time which was pre Internet banking.
Most recently - and for reasons they've never explained - I was locked out of my banking app despite having it set up with Face ID login which had worked for years. The app came up with a message asking me to set it up as a new user. It then wouldn't authenticate me using other details, which I know were correct. Phoned the telephone banking number. Worryingly they couldn't identify me. The resolution? You have to go into a branch to resolve this and there is literally no other way. But... HSBC closed my local branch years ago. So a car journey and some panic it was.
Now, when I actually got into the branch, super helpful and everything resolved in around 15 mins not including waiting around the same time.
I have other neo-bank accounts from the likes of Monzo which do not have any kind of branch. It did make me wonder what you'd do in a scenario like this with a bank that has no branches. But then perhaps that is part of the problem. If they don't have branches then they can't use the "come into a branch to sort our own mess out" excuse.
It seems to me like their systems are a mismash of preferring people to do everything online in the first instance. But when that inevitably doesn't work they tell you to either speak to somebody that can't help on a phone, or come into a branch that doesn't exist.
I moved to Monzo for precisely this reason.
They can't fob you off, they have to deal with it themselves.
And given that I set up my account with them by a photo, an ID and entirely online, they can use similar to identify me without having to make a "branch visit" (which wouldn't be possible).
Worst case, they would just write to you, recorded delivery, I imagine. Same as I've had other banks do when I refuse to drive across town during working hours just to identify myself (but yet they're quite happy to speak to me on the phone or process thousands of pounds of payments in my name without the same...).
Have never had cause to contact Monzo because everything I want to do is just in the app. If I can't get to the app, why would I need anything more than it originally took to get an account via the app? It shouldn't.
The response is never:
"Yes, our bad, our system is having a lie down right now, we're trying to wake it up - deepest apologies. Watch this space where techies not the Marketing Dept we will keep you updated.
The bit which makes me borderline homicidal is that every &#@£ing one of these missives, every single one, includes the words "some of our customers may be..."
Your system's borked your muppet - it's ALL of your bloody customers that want your head on a pike!!!
Sorry... */Rant Mode = Off/*
Twenty years ago, I and a small team built HSBC's global email system (Lotus Notes/Domino). Previously they had separate (internal) mail domains in the different regions.
I built the first server, first registered user, global admin. Then five years later they offshored everything and I took voluntary redundancy because they were shipping all support offshore (can't remember which country but obviously the cheapest). When I left, 130,000+ users.
I did get to spend 9 months travelling around the world on their dime (the redundancy payment) so they're still in my affections whatever their faults. ;-)
This post has been deleted by its author
That is an increasing problem it seems. Not that I'm in IT myself (other than the wiring side!) but the number of times some outage is 'we have no idea why this happened' seems to be increasing. Overly complex systems? Or they laid off the only guy who knows how it worked. Or both?
Have a beer on behalf of that insider, he or she will need it>>
I reckon I've got enough material to fill a book about my experiences with HSBC as a customer.
ATM (At The Moment) they are pestering me to have internet banking and this out[r]age kinda demonstrates why I don't think *they* are ready for it. They keep putting obstacles in the way of doing things other ways, such as prohibiting business customers from using their in-branch statement machines.
(Posting Anon: I don't normally, but hope you can see why).
Here's an idea for the regulators. For every hour an alleged online banking system is offline the bank is required to open a given number* of branches and keep them running for a minimum of 10 years before closing them. It might or might not be an effective incentive to improve uptime but it would help to provide a mitigation.
* Perhaps dependent on the potential number of customers affected.
The reason most are shutting branches is that after the 2008 crash most of them decided to sell the branch freehold and lease them back. They took "advice" that branches were soon to be dead and so they wouldn't need them, take the sorely needed cash injection to prop up the balance sheet and then watch online replace them. Treble bonuses all around!
Unfortunately someone forgot to tell the customers so they kept going! Branches are now expensive because the lease deals they signed are coming up and the inevitable cost spiral is at play. Its a situation the banks have caused themselves so I have little sympathy when they try to deflect!
I could be having memory issues, but it seems whenever there's an excessive bank service outage, HSBC always is mentioned.
I can't recall many other banks suffering the same frequency. I can't recall any incidents at my bank of choice in the last decade or more.
Seems that avoiding HSBC is the trick here and if you are a customer, time to switch!
All of the "old" banks are stuck in a tech death spiral here.
Decades of various tech that has been glued together via either expensive consultancy or old employees that have now left or made redundant means no one really understands how everything works. Huge swathes of the estates are either in paid for extensions, completely out of date, or on perpetual life support. All of it is either outsourced or at a minimum "offshore" resource is bought in to help create the impression of costs under control (ignore the spiralling maintenance bill). SIs will be swapped out every few years via procurement meaning a constant rotating door of people trying to get their heads around a system, only to leave when they are getting close.
Throw in this pavlovian reflex to be seen to be "innovative" and staying up to date (usually helped by a consultancy or tech company trying to flog the latest and greatest craze and the layer cake gets bigger every year. Inside the industry HSBC are crowing about how they are going to lead the industry with GenAI and throwing money around like its going out of fashion, yet they cant get the basics right!
What they all need to do is hit the pause button for a few years, rehire their own IT professionals and just focus on fixing the basics and getting general systems under control. Banks are actually pretty simple business models with only a few product lines via a few channels with some regulatory reporting and overhead that is reasonably standard (so you should get ISVs to create a model that everyone uses rather than reinventing every time!)
Decades of various tech that has been glued together
and
What they all need to do is hit the pause button for a few years, rehire their own IT professionals
aren't compatible though. One of my friends made a good - and extremely worrying - point recently. That a lot of critical infrastructure such as banking, airline reservation systems etc, are actually run on decades old technology. Which as you say is glued together to make it work with newer tech.
There could easily be a time where nobody fully understands how any of it works and "the system" collapses. The problem of rehiring the IT professionals who were involved decades ago is exactly that. It was decades ago and they are no longer in employment or in many instances, have since died.
It really is worrying. Neo-banks like Monzo ultimately will need to interface with older systems so they aren't the solution either.
As a former employee of Midland bank and so later HSBC, I kept my (free) Premier account for the included free travel insurance, still have it despite being too old for the travel cover anymore. The only remaining benefit is a very high spending limit on my card, just as a contingency.
My Pension gets paid in and most of it promptly transferred to a challenger bank, virtually no other transactions at HSBC. It's useful to have a secondary bank in case there is a problem with the primary one.
Elsewhere I get cash back on much of my spending and a linked savings account that pays a reasonable interest rate, last time I looked HSBC linked savings rate was less than 1%.
HSBC just isn't interested in retail banking, it's expensive to provide. Even having ditched most branches it's not very profitable. When I needed an account for a new business they required an appointment with a manager but the earliest appointment they could offer was 6 weeks later and they wanted a business plan and minutes of the directors meeting (at which, as sole owner, director, employee I'd have been the only attendee). I had customers wanting to pay and suppliers who needed paying so I opened an account with Starling, same day.
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