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May 18, 2006
The rural, backwards Northwest
I’ve just opened a new bank account here in Seattle to replace the old one we’re closing in Texas. I’ve used Bank of America forever, and their online banking website is really quite good. They’ve steadily fixed little annoyances with it, and have added worthwhile features. But not in Washington.
The Northwest region apparently doesn’t rate the same quality of online banking that Texas does. Here in Seattle, the site is weak. And I don’t just mean “dude, it’s weak”, I mean that the site is an underpowered toy version of the one I’ve used for the last several years.
Right from the login, it already sucks: I can only log in using my account number, social security number, and password. In Texas, I simply had a username and password, just like every other e-commerce site.Ok, I realized I could set a default account and SSN to use on login. Now it just feels less secure, although the Texas-style login seems to be coming in June. :-\
Online bill paying, one of the best inventions on the whole wide interweb, limits me to paying only merchants that already appear in the Bank of America database. That means that I couldn’t, say, set up a recurring automatic payment to pay my rent, like I did in Texas.
And the “Keep the Change” offer isn’t available here, either! I might as well keep my money under my mattress.
Posted by Andrew at May 18, 2006 10:05 PM
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