Maheriano
February 20th, 2009, 02:50 AM
**Hopefully this letter finds its way to the head of the IT department. I'm not at all interested in answers about my issues, nor an apology of any sort. This email is my message to you as to how you can fix your software system while saving money doing so. You won't lose me as a customer over this so don't worry about it.**
I was just at one of your branches with a problem and was alarmed at what I found. At the beginning of the month I had put money into an ATM and later that day wrote a cheque for the money I deposited. Of course the money was held, the cheque bounced and I was enquiring about it. Here's what happened:
I move money from my RBC account every month into this account just to pay my rent via cheque. There is a serious lack of communication between banks and moving money around is impossible without incurring some type of fee. I can't do it online because I'd have to either wait for it to clear or pay a fee to email it. I can't do it at the ATM because I'd have to wait for that to clear. My only option is to do it at the teller, waiting in line behind the rest of the city who is doing the same thing and being late for work. So the guy offered to set me up on an automatic transfer every month which would be immediate, he just needs my RBC account information. I asked him if I gave it to him, would be be able to do a test run to see if it's correct but apparently he can't. Either the information is correct or it'll come back in a few days as failed. This is a serious lack of communication between banks.
So he checked my credit to see if I should be at a partial 200 hold (holding all my deposits over $200) and he said no, my lack of credit with the credit company keeps me at the partial 200 hold. The most bizarre part of this is that he checked an external credit service instead of simply checking my banking history with TD. I've been with TD on and off for the last 10-15 years so the bank has a complete history of me and what my spending tendencies are. Instead of using this goldmine of free information they have access to, they decide to check an external credit bureau which they can't get any information from except the fact that I don't have much credit. Does this make sense? If you have a complete spending history for someone, why don't you use it?
Then he tells me he made a mistake and it should actually be a partial 600 hold and he changed it. I asked why it didn't update automatically and he said it's because the system doesn't work like that. That's interesting, I have to personally ask for it? Should I go back tomorrow and ask again?
Lastly, when I use the ATM to enter my PIN, it makes a very loud beeping noise every time I push a button. This means the crackhead asleep on the floor behind me now knows how many numbers are in my PIN, do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Number input in the ATM should be silent to keep as secret as possible. The user can see how many numbers they pushed by the number of stars (*) on the screen.
Now on to the part where I help you. You probably get a lot of complaint letters but what good are they if nobody provides solutions? I'm a software developer, the largest oil companies in the world trust their seismic data management to software I created. So for me to hear an answer of, "Our system doesn't work like that" is unacceptable. If it doesn't work that way and I have clearly pointed out that it should, then change it. I can see the problem arises when you start getting into proprietary software, version releases and project management to modify a piece of software like this.....if your license for the product even allows it. I can see that it would be very expensive and my single savings account is not enough of an influence for you to even think about deploying a team of developers and a manager to oversee the project just to make me happy. You need to think larger than that.
If you've ever used Linux as an alternative to Windows, you know about the open source nature of it and the GNU General Public License (GPL). If you were to take your source code that runs all your systems and release it to the public, then guys like me could take it and modify it to make it better. What's best is that you would have this network of worldwide developers at your disposal, updating your product completely free of charge. Ultimately you and your team would be responsible for what gets accepted into the master copy of the source code and what doesn't but you wouldn't have to worry about version releases and deadlines. It wouldn't be long until other banks adopted the idea as well, then my problems of testing the account information to see if it is correct would be gone. You could hit a button that says TEST and it'll ping RBC to see if the entered information for my account is valid. When my credit improves, it would automatically update my account with the new hold policies, everything would work exactly how the customer wants it to because the customer is the one modifying it.
I guarantee you open source software is the way of the future and will save your company millions of dollars in development costs in the future. And if you're worried about security, all source code is reviewed by your team prior to being accepted into the master version and of course nothing is going to work outside your network. And the beeping ATM.....well that's an easy fix.
I was just at one of your branches with a problem and was alarmed at what I found. At the beginning of the month I had put money into an ATM and later that day wrote a cheque for the money I deposited. Of course the money was held, the cheque bounced and I was enquiring about it. Here's what happened:
I move money from my RBC account every month into this account just to pay my rent via cheque. There is a serious lack of communication between banks and moving money around is impossible without incurring some type of fee. I can't do it online because I'd have to either wait for it to clear or pay a fee to email it. I can't do it at the ATM because I'd have to wait for that to clear. My only option is to do it at the teller, waiting in line behind the rest of the city who is doing the same thing and being late for work. So the guy offered to set me up on an automatic transfer every month which would be immediate, he just needs my RBC account information. I asked him if I gave it to him, would be be able to do a test run to see if it's correct but apparently he can't. Either the information is correct or it'll come back in a few days as failed. This is a serious lack of communication between banks.
So he checked my credit to see if I should be at a partial 200 hold (holding all my deposits over $200) and he said no, my lack of credit with the credit company keeps me at the partial 200 hold. The most bizarre part of this is that he checked an external credit service instead of simply checking my banking history with TD. I've been with TD on and off for the last 10-15 years so the bank has a complete history of me and what my spending tendencies are. Instead of using this goldmine of free information they have access to, they decide to check an external credit bureau which they can't get any information from except the fact that I don't have much credit. Does this make sense? If you have a complete spending history for someone, why don't you use it?
Then he tells me he made a mistake and it should actually be a partial 600 hold and he changed it. I asked why it didn't update automatically and he said it's because the system doesn't work like that. That's interesting, I have to personally ask for it? Should I go back tomorrow and ask again?
Lastly, when I use the ATM to enter my PIN, it makes a very loud beeping noise every time I push a button. This means the crackhead asleep on the floor behind me now knows how many numbers are in my PIN, do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Number input in the ATM should be silent to keep as secret as possible. The user can see how many numbers they pushed by the number of stars (*) on the screen.
Now on to the part where I help you. You probably get a lot of complaint letters but what good are they if nobody provides solutions? I'm a software developer, the largest oil companies in the world trust their seismic data management to software I created. So for me to hear an answer of, "Our system doesn't work like that" is unacceptable. If it doesn't work that way and I have clearly pointed out that it should, then change it. I can see the problem arises when you start getting into proprietary software, version releases and project management to modify a piece of software like this.....if your license for the product even allows it. I can see that it would be very expensive and my single savings account is not enough of an influence for you to even think about deploying a team of developers and a manager to oversee the project just to make me happy. You need to think larger than that.
If you've ever used Linux as an alternative to Windows, you know about the open source nature of it and the GNU General Public License (GPL). If you were to take your source code that runs all your systems and release it to the public, then guys like me could take it and modify it to make it better. What's best is that you would have this network of worldwide developers at your disposal, updating your product completely free of charge. Ultimately you and your team would be responsible for what gets accepted into the master copy of the source code and what doesn't but you wouldn't have to worry about version releases and deadlines. It wouldn't be long until other banks adopted the idea as well, then my problems of testing the account information to see if it is correct would be gone. You could hit a button that says TEST and it'll ping RBC to see if the entered information for my account is valid. When my credit improves, it would automatically update my account with the new hold policies, everything would work exactly how the customer wants it to because the customer is the one modifying it.
I guarantee you open source software is the way of the future and will save your company millions of dollars in development costs in the future. And if you're worried about security, all source code is reviewed by your team prior to being accepted into the master version and of course nothing is going to work outside your network. And the beeping ATM.....well that's an easy fix.