Guessing their clients aren’t banking via mobile apps, their staff having lines to their banker. Most top-tier private banks barely have an online presence. If you want something, you (or your assistant) calls or texts your banker.
Look, I'm a data engineer by day, I understand how bad UIs happen. I use Airflow, for God's sake, and heavily customized Airflow at that (where we've honestly only kind of roughly kept pace with the UI quality. like I said, I get how bad UIs happen).
But seriously. I try to be charitable. I can understand how page flows might be janky, how you might need a few redirects as they pass you through decades of legacy systems, etc.
But by God, there are some pages where I seriously cannot figure how they made that specific page, alone, in isolation so bad. The only thing I can come up with is they either a) contracted it out to someone who is literally not as capable as someone 2 years into a CS degree, or they've split the page among multiple teams who all wrote little scraps of HTML and JS and then some poor soul had to weld them all together and that's how it ended up.
Is it really just that they all hire huge incompetent contractors who "nobody ever got fired for hiring etc etc" and then they invariably fuck it up? I don't get how that doesn't get disrupted by either SaaS or just someone making a contracting shop that actually finishes projects correctly.
Oh sweet summer child. You have not known the sharp pain of regulatory constraints, split stakeholder constraints, legacy enterprise constraints, COVID constraints. You know not of capacity planning, SOC2, or international banking law.
You have not known the one million lines of code repositories (PLURAL).
You do not see behind the summer rain. To the endless blizzard of business logic behind the frontend. To the third party vendors, evil so vast if it were written down the generations beyond could never forgive.
I envy you greatly.
I've exclusively worked in highly regulated industries - first a registered broker dealer where one of my (less favored) hats I wore was working directly with the SEC and FINRA handling inquiries, and the second being a large fintech company I don't want to be too specific about that dealt with a lot of banking and money movement regulations.
I'd appreciate it if you'd point your condescending prose elsewhere. I stand by my point. There's no reason some of the banking sites I've had to use should be so bad given their funding. If an ungraduated CS student can make their website not break chrome's credit card autocompletion, why can't enormous banks?
Wonder why a transaction was denied? Shoot an email with a screenshot. Want 500$ of Moroccan Dirhams for your next trip? Shoot a text and they'll put together a package + a few sweets for you to pick up when you stop by.
Edit: 5 downvotes, tough crowd
What do you mean by that? In a way it's not retro enough (for me?), I currently have an account that can only be accessed via a mobile app (e.g. no website). See for instance https://www.neon-free.ch/en/
You can open an account fully online from your home, I don't think you even have to mail anything.
Opening an account with Neon is the simplest thing ever.
I'm still on the phone weekly with CS to even attempt to make them do anything I've ordered them to.
Three weeks ago, they sent me a letter to confirm that my email address was authorized to make orders. I sent that back with the enclosed envelope. 4 days later, they called me to confirm my order. I did (verbally). They called back 10min later to confirm again. I confirmed again.
It has been two weeks since that phone call and the transfer has still not been completed.
Neo banks are more modern and convenient but only compared to traditional banks within CH: spotty online bills support, no twint (or prepay twint), money transfers only occur once a day at 10am on banking days, customer service open from 9 to 5… Banks in CH are hilariously bad (and expensive), and it’s a shock because you always have this image that Switzerland banks must be amazing. Nope, far from it.
For the rest I guess it's things I don't personally care about, so while it could be better (I have a EUR account for which my recipients get transfers within hours), I don't really notice it in practice.