Are you happy to jump through hoops for telephone banking?

Recently, my partner and I did an experiment with our banks. We both needed to have print-outs of our last 3 months’ bank statements to send to the mortgage company, so we both called our banks and made the request.

The call to my bank took 1 minute and 30 seconds, and I had the statements through the letterbox 3 days later. The phone was answered immediately by a human being.

My partner called his bank and was on the phone for 19 minutes, and didn’t receive the statements till 3 weeks later. The automated menus he had to navigate in the first instance took up a significant proportion of this time, and I could see him getting frustrated as he tried to work out exactly which option was the one he needed.

In both cases, we had to provide similar amounts of security information, which I believe was secure enough to deter potential fraudsters, even if they overheard my call in its entirety.

Telephone banking with First Direct is quick, easy and enjoyable. I have been with them for 9 years after trying Internet banking with Barclays. Every call to them is answered by a human after just a few rings and that person then deals with your request. They are very friendly, never try and sell you other financial products if you have stated that you do not wish to be bothered with marketing information but are willing to supply financial information if requested.

I only ever had one problem when I couldn’t remember my password and elected to go through security questions instead. Now I have done this for some time and am happy to supply the answers to about four questions. The person dealing with my call kept telling me to ‘have a stab’ at the password. I insisted on going the security questions route instead and told her that I wished to complain that she was not following the procedure for those forgetting their password. She then put me through to a manager who went on in great detail about security and after telling her I was quite happy to answer security questions, she proceeded to ask 13 security questions which I had no difficulty answering. She made her point!!! After that particular phone call, I considered leaving First Direct but as I had 9 trouble free years and had lauded their customer service over the years at every chance, I decided to stay with them. I rang them up and set up a new password which I hopefully will remember.

I think we should be able to choose our own security questions to go alongside the standard questions. I also think we are expected to remember too many user names and passwords If I wish to comment on a newspaper story or comment on a TV programme I have to set up an account with a user name and password. I am very security minded but my head is almost exploding trying to remember them all.

UK banks need to sort out their communication methods with their customers, as banks have already done in other countries.

One very simple but effective communication method is secure e-mail. Unlike conventional e-mail, secure e-mail is embedded within the online banking session with the same encryption and authentication used by the transactional side of online banking. Therefore any messages are pre-authenticated and cannot be intercepted by a third party. Only notifications of new secure e-mails are sent by conventional e-mail. This reduces significantly the number of scenarios where a customer needs to speak by telephone to the bank. On the rare occasions that a customer needs a voice phone call, they can request a call back via online banking, whereby the bank phones the customer back on a number of their choice. The web site gives the customer a single-use 2-digit code to enter when they answer the call to validate that the bank’s outgoing call has reached the customer rather than an unauthorised third party.