The media do love to take a pop at banks. Whether it is
banker’s bonuses, overdraft charges or miss-selling, the knives frequently come
out, as they did this week over miss-selling of identity theft protection. Despite
working in banking for over thirty years, I do accept that a lot of the
criticism is valid, but I also know that if my experiences are anything to go
by the majority of people working for banks want to offer customers a good
service, are disappointed and sometimes embarrassed when things go wrong, and
are quick to accept it when that happens and to put it right.
Over the years a popular theme for media criticism has been
account switching, when the factoid that you are more likely to be divorced
than to change your bank account is trotted out, usually without any figures to
back up the statement. Some credence may be attributed to the statement on the
basis that the average length of a marriage, as calculated by the Office of
National Statistics[1],
was eleven years in 2010, whereas the Independent Banking Commission found that
on average, account holders change their bank account every twenty six years. To
put these statistics into a different context, in 2011 there were 117,558
divorces recorded in the UK, whilst in 2012 a whopping 1,200,000 people
switched their bank account. As ever with statistics, you pay your money and
chose the ones that prove your point.
The common criticism when it comes to switching bank
accounts is that banks make it difficult for people to do so; Shadow Chancellor
Ed Balls said so on The Andrew Marr Show last year, so it must be true.
Presumably then, Mr Balls will be pleased with the Current Account Switch
Service being introduced into the banking industry in September. The Payments
Council, who are behind this initiative, intend that this will enable banks to
deliver a “seamless, hassle-free switching service” completed within seven
working days. One of the factors in this is that whereas it has always been the
task of the banks to ensure that Direct Debits and Standing Orders are
transferred across automatically, the notification to Remitters of a
Beneficiary’s new bank details was the responsibility of the account holder,
but this has now passed to the banks.[2]
There are people, Conservative MPs for example, who would go
one step further and require account number portability, i.e. an account number
for life that would follow customers from bank to bank. I’m not sure what sort
of world that people who propose this sort of thing inhabit, but presumably it
is equipped with nice padded walls and no sharp implements. Account Number
portability would cost unimaginable amounts of money and take many years to
implement. The Payments Council has looked into the possibility and recognises
that delivering portability would require a central utility and the replacement
of the current Sort Code/Account Number system; potentially they say, every customer, not just those switching
their accounts, would need to have a new account number. And who would pay for
the investment required to accomplish this? The customer, that’s who. Free (if
in credit) banking is now so ingrained in UK banking culture that any bank that
began charging for Standing Orders, ATM transactions and the like would see a stampede
of customers moving their accounts away. Account Number portability as imagined
by the Payments Council would be expensive to implement and to pay for it banks
would introduce Current Account charging. Frankly I cannot see it being
long before one of the High Street banks begins to charge all Current Account
customers for their accounts anyway, and where one bank goes, the others will
follow sooner or later.
People, be they Members of Parliament, journalists or the
man on the Clapham omnibus, have a habit of believing that in this day and age
if they can imagine it then it can be done. It always amuses me to read, and it
is a phrase that commonly appears in newspapers, that such and such can be
achieved “at the touch of a button.” Banks can transfer money from one side of
the globe to another instantaneously, “at the touch of a button.” Banks should
be able to transfer accounts, “at the touch of a button.” Few people have any
comprehension of the amount of time and effort required to make something happen
“at the touch of a button,” be it in banking or any other industry.
 |
| The famous button, at the touch of which, anything is possible. |
For some fourteen years of my working life I was in some way
responsible for making things happen “at the touch of a button” which can be
very rewarding when you deliver the finished product, but extremely frustrating
getting there.
Firstly there are the user’s requirements, which are either
vague in the extreme and require innumerable meetings to extract, like blood
from a stone, the user’s needs, or the requirements will contain all manner of
fanciful, impracticable and sometimes bizarre features. This is sometimes
referred to as wanting “the moon on a stick.” Inevitably however good, bad or
indifferent the user’s requirements, one crucial factor will be forgotten and
only introduced at a very late stage, to the consternation of all involved[3].
 |
| What users want. |
The user’s requirements having been shoe-horned into a
design document, which hopefully the users will sign off, development commences.
Now the fun starts. Sometimes the needs of the users simply cannot be
transformed into something workable; sometimes the software simply will not
support the requirements; sometimes the developers have their own ideas about
what the users want and build what they think is required rather than what was
actually asked for. There are occasions when what the users want simply cannot
be accommodated and a certain element of manual working is required; naturally
once a human element is added to the process, the possibilities for some sort
of error are increased. I would bet a pound to a penny that systems developed
to accommodate account switching have gone through this process of compromise
and negotiation and that some element will have potential failure points.
After development comes the testing (which, along with the
requirement gathering and some of the design, was where I came in). Oh what fun
to be given a new application or system or change to an existing one, and to
try to break it, because that is what testing is largely about. It is very easy
to test something and prove it works; the key to testing is to do the
unexpected, to do things that are wrong, to try and make a system do something
it was not designed for. When it comes to testing something it really is how it
handles the exceptions that counts.
Ostensibly my role was a system tester, but I normally
undertook User Acceptance Testing (UAT) too; usually because the business had
too few people to spare to do it themselves. If they did do their own testing
it would normally be in a fairly cursory manner. On one memorable occasion,
many years ago, users failed to highlight a defect that they found in their
testing on the grounds that they assumed it work properly when it went live.
Err, not unless you tell someone to fix it, it won’t!
UAT is interesting; you have to get yourself inside the mind
of someone who will actually use whatever it is you are testing and try to
think of the most outrageous, obscure, bizarre sort of error that they could
possibly make and try and replicate it. I like to think that I was pretty good
at that, but I have to admit that no matter how hard I tried, real users,
dealing with real customers and with real data, would always somehow create a
scenario more unlikely than I could possibly have imagined. This would result
in some change being necessary to the system, or sometimes some sort of manual
workaround, temporary or permanent.
I anticipate that at some stage in the near future an
article will appear in the press, or a feature will be shown on TV,
highlighting horror stories of people who have had problems switching accounts
despite the new service and its promises to simplify the process. At some point
during that article or discussion, someone will in all probability say that it
really should be achievable “at the touch of a button.” It would be nice, if
just for once, someone acknowledged exactly what is required to make something
happen “at the touch of a button.”
[1]
Or, as they were known to one of my favourite writers, Keith Waterhouse, The
National Guesswork Authority.
[2]
Full details of the Current Account Switch Service can be found on the Payments
Council website http://www.paymentscouncil.org.uk/
[3]
Sometimes known as scope creep, the introduction of critical requirements,
sometimes on the eve of implementation is a frustration known only too well in
IT departments.
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