Upgrade?

I've been banking with People's United Bank in CT for years. I even kept them as my primary bank when I moved to VA 15 years ago, and I've never had any major problems. Sure there's been a couple hiccups along the way, but nothing that wasn't quickly and easily resolved.

Even though they don't have any local presence, their phone and online systems (which they've had forever) have made it simple to do almost anything I need to do.

When they recently announce that they'd be updating the online banking system, I was interested, but not at all worried. After all, the existing system was a little long in the tooth and a refresh couldn't hurt.

So what did they deliver? Visually, the new site looks worse than the old one, but if that was the only problem, I wouldn't be writing this post. The whole online banking system has been outsourced, and that's not good. I like my browser to stay at the site that I logged in to, especially when it's my bank!

But even those things are minor. My first hint of something rotten was an email I got on Wednesday. It showed the details of the online payments I'd made via the new site on Monday. I'd never received such an email before, and I certainly didn't request any such email. I logged on to the new system and struggled to find out what setting I had to change. Finally I found it. Or should I say "them". The option to receive email about payments made is set on every payee that I have. The only way to turn off those emails is to go into each and every payee and flip the setting. So without my permission or any prior notification, People's is now sending details of my payment activity out over unencrypted email. No Thanks.

I used their in-system message function to complain about this and got no response until I looked at my email this morning (three days later). Of course it wasn't actually a response, it was just a notification that "A secure message is available for viewing. Please sign on to online banking to view the message." Fair enough. I logged in and went to read the message, only to see "Thank you for contacting People's United Bank. We will reply to your inquiry as quickly as possible. In the interim many of our customers have found the information available in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the people.com Upgrade site very helpful. " [note that it really does say people.com not peoples.] So they have no problem with sending my payment information out over email, but to send me an automated reply, they use their secure messaging system?

Since I was logged in anyway, I looked at my accounts. One of the things lost in the transition to the new system was the display of a running balance column. People's sent an email on February 18 saying "this feature will be available by February 24". Well my calendar tells me that today is the the 27th, and there's no running balance. They also seem to have lost the ability to show me any holds that might exist on my checking account, so even though there's a current balance and an available balance, if they're different I have no way to tell why. (I happen to know why in this case, but that's not the point).

So I used their wonderful secure messaging system again and complained about 1) the fact that an automated response took three days, 2) the missing running balance and 3) the missing hold information. Then I logged off.

This time they managed to get me an automated response in just a couple minutes. I got the same email about a "secure message" being available, so logged back in just to see what it said. Interestingly, they'd used some sort of message parsing magic to determine that I'd asked about the running balance. Their response to this? "Your running balance will be available online as of February 29th."

Great, only two years from now!

People's United Bank online banking upgrade?

FAIL!