The internet is a funny place. One where extraordinary convenience and ease of use cause users to feel that even the slightest inconvenience is an atrocity to be vociferously denounced.
Though on the other hand, sometimes those incidents cause financial concern for a great number of people, if those services are tied up in financial concerns. Such was the case with the recent transition of Alliance and Leicester systems over to the possession of Santander, which is working on integrating its acquisitions so that customers can access the broader Santander network, which, given all the recent acquisitions by the Spanish banking group, is rather significant. Customers will of course be better served by such expansion, but the transition has hit a small section of the millions of Alliance and Leicester customers by preventing them from logging into their accounts online.
This of course is quite a significant problem for those clients that have experienced difficulty, and generally clients in need of account access will be rather vocal about being incapable of doing so, hopefully spurring an improvement in any future transitions that may occur. Whether Santander or Alliance & Leicester are to blame may or may not be the case, but it is certainly a lesson to be taken seriously for future plans in any case.
Customers are advised to speak with customer service, in which case the problems are more likely to be resolved, and the problems themselves were reported as limited to particular customers attempting particular sorts of transactions, and is something to be expected with this type of acquisition. However, the banking industry in particular has been watching acquisitions occur left and right in recent years, as financially stable institutions absorb some of the more fragile businesses, and these issues are likely to continue, along with other evolutions due to the same cause.
As online banking becomes an increasingly ubiquitous service (it is nearly universal now, but is only likely to become more important as the few individuals not connected to the internet disappear in coming years), its reliability will become increasingly tested, and the recent spate of internet hacking has only highlighted the importance of security, problem-free functionality and constant availability. Clients expect these systems to work, and backup needs to become another synonym for normal.
Oddly, glitches that have been happening with varying frequency in the banking sector are not nearly as common in the world of Amazon and other heavy hitters in the online arena. Perhaps this is due to their beginnings as an inherently online entity, and thus the importance of digital functionality has been a priority from the outset, more so than banking institutions, which viewed online banking as a fairly recent development to their systems, but there will eventually become no excuse for poorly functioning network facilities. Customers will demand perfection, and, despite the inertia inherent to the banking sector due to the difficulty of switching over accounts, they will likely exit en masse when confronted with the sorts of problems with online banking that they never experience with, for example, looking things up in Google (has anyone ever seen it go down?).
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