FNB’s great new site

Vincent Maher has beaten me to it, blogging about FNB’s new site in a post aptly titled Why FNB’s new banking website sucks.

Right now he’s understandably furious having been unable to make urgent payments. Luckily I’m not the Ethical Co-op bookkeeper anymore, so I don’t use it that regularly, but I still use FNB for my own business account. I use Go Banking for my personal account (which is a branded version of Nedbank’s site).

Here are my comments on the new site:

• Why have the login details been removed from the front page? One more wasted click just to get to the login page, which is all 90% of visitors surely do. I can see that it directs to https, but why not just redirect the front page to an https equivalent. Go Banking has the same annoyance, and worse, it forces me to wait longer for a Flash download.
• The old site had exactly the same issue Vince mentioned of payments not being reflected, leaving me unsure of whether they were made or not, so nothing has really changed there. You’d have thought they’d have fixed it by now.
• Another annoyance is that the downloaded statements are now zipped. Fine, it saves bandwidth for them, but it’s another unnecessary step, and I’d rather just download the PDF thank you.
• A new feature, that I’ve only spotted while writing this (it was different this morning) is that the rendering has gone for a ball, and the choice of download format is now off the bottom of the frame, and the only way to read it is to reduce the font size to barely legible.
• FNB Internet banking has been up and down for weeks, even before the changeover. It must be the least reliable of the banking sites, and the changeover has brought no improvement.

In short, FNB’s new site is a step backwards in usability. But it’s still well ahead of Go Banking/Nedbank. Their site forces me to use a profile as well as a password and a PIN (FNB is just a username/password, which at least I can remember without cutting and pasting every time). Nedbank’s making payments, downloading of statements, and proof of payment system is also behind FNB’s (though perhaps I’m comparing a business account – FNB – to a personal account – Nedbank? But shouldn’t the personal account be easier to use?) The only reason I use Go Banking is because the charges are much lower, and the interest much better.

Here’s hoping FNB learns from the experience. It’s good to see bloggers being quite vociferous, and can only lead to an improvement in the banks future efforts.

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