Height Of eBanking Irony

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Height of eBanking Irony is when

  1. My bank wants me to visit its branch to update my email. I wonder why I can’t convey my new email address to my bank via Internet Banking or in a letter signed by me in ‘wet ink’.
  2. Left with no choice, I visit the branch, but find that it has moved.
  3. Despite ‘friending’ it on Facebook, my bank doesn’t notify me of such an important event as branch shift in advance. (Of course, I keep getting irrelevant offers from it on my newsfeed). When I ask my bank if payors who customarily make electronic fund transfers to my account need to update the branch address field in their ‘List of Beneficiaries’ screen, my bank is clueless.
  4. Electronic Fund Transfers happen in one hour but my bank won’t let me initiate an EFT for 24 hours. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has established a net settlement system that can complete a retail payment transaction within one hour by running over 10 settlement cycles during an 8 hour window. However, my bank takes 24 hours to approve my request to add a new payee, without which I can’t initiate the ePayment. It doesn’t bother to explain how this 24 hour ‘cooling period’ benefits the payor, payee or itself. Float is the usual suspect in these matters but it can’t be held responsible in this specific situation since my account doesn’t get debited until the next day.
  5. ePayments need cheques. Apart from providing my bank account details, I’m required to submit a canceled cheque before a payor can transfer money to my account electronically. Asking payors why this step is required is pointless since all of them uniformly blame it on ‘RBI Mandate’. It’s quite dumb for the payor to require the canceled cheque to establish that I’m the legitimate owner of the said account – as though I’m stupid enough to submit the details of somebody else’s bank account and watch my money to go there.
  6. The regulator makes online payments more secure but most people prefer to pay with cash even for e-commerce purchases. By mandating two-factor authentication, the regulator has tried to make online shoppers feel more safe about making ePayments via cards, bank transfers, and so on. However, the average shopper is put off by the friction caused by extra passwords and frequent transaction outages. Therefore, cash on delivery becomes the most popular method of payment for e-commerce in India.
  7. My biller adds passwords to ostensibly make me feel more comfortable with its eBills and eStatements but I actually go back to its printed bills and statements. This one needs a whole blog post to explain. Luckily, I’ve already written it here.
  8. I can make a digital payment without entering a single password but, to view my PDF eBills and eStatements, I have to enter one password to access my email and another password to open the PDF. What’s worse, I need to enter the second password to open the PDF every time in future.

I’d love to hear more examples of ironies in Internet, mobile and social media banking, whether restricted to a few banks or applicable across the country.

UPDATE DATED 8 JULY 2020:

Eight years after I wrote the above original post, many of the aforementioned ironies with digital banking remain. Except #4 (cooling periods for NEFT / IMPS payments have dropped to 30 minutes) and #6 to some extent (with the launch of UPI payments which work only on mobile devices and, accordingly, make one of the two factors of authentication implicit and thereby more frictionless).