An example of bad teamwork

Following up from an earlier post of mine, I'll describe another instance where the confluence between online and brick-and-mortar banking doesn't quite work as it should.

I relocated from Bengaluru to Hyderabad, and I don't like opening new bank accounts every place I visit. I don't like that paperwork, mailers and managing multiple accounts and cards. Why should I "leave a trail" of sorts as I keep moving around? It just doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I asked HDFC, with whom I've banked for 7+ years now to transfer my account with them in Bengaluru to a branch of my choice in Hyderabad. I did this 5 years back too when I had to move my first HDFC account between the two cities. It was a very painless affair, and I expected nothing less this time (May 21, 2010).

Only, I'm still screaming at CSRs and the branch personnel every few days as not only has the old account not been deleted, but the ATM card still considers the old account as primary. And this is after all the funds have been transferred by the bank from the old to the new account. So I'm now in this uncomfortable situation where I cannot withdraw money from a non-HDFC ATM, because those only allow linking to the primary account. For all the things HDFC has got right, there's one very glaring wrong -- the relative scarcity of HDFC ATMs. The nearest one from my office is 3 km away, the nearest from home is between 3 and 4 km away and there is perhaps only one (or two) along my current 23 km (one-way) commute. Their website lists only fifteen - yes, one five - non-branch ATMs in the whole of Hyderabad! I now have a negative balance in the old account because of penalties levied on me for trying to draw money from an account with no balance. Brilliant!

I found out the reason for this snafu only after I threatened to switch banks (I'm a Classic Privileged or whatchamcallit customer). Not after a couple of phone calls to the CSR or a friendly visit to the branch to withdraw money, but after threatening to pull the plug. The reason is described below.

Some time ago I'd asked for the ability to conduct mutual fund transactions on my account and I got it. This MF account was tied to the old savings account. The account transfer form, which contains a long list of things that the customer might want transferred/updated (add-on cards, credit cards, addresses, phone numbers, demat a/c details etc.) doesn't have a section where a customer could either close down or transfer an MF account. However, their systems don't allow a savings account to be closed if an MF account is linked to it. And their systems also don't allow the new account to be created as primary and have the ATM card linked to it *despite the customer clearly indicating so* on the transfer form. More brilliance!

I'm guessing HDFC has outsourced its NetBanking and other online banking work to one of those great IT powerhouses and someone somewhere's forgotten translating a new process/constraint (MF transactions were added much after NetBanking came into existence).

This is a classic situation of the left hand (retail liabilities, probably) not knowing what the right hand (backed systems/IT for NetBanking) is up to.

Funny ad

See the new "Lemon" mobile ad on TV recently?

It's one of the corniest ads I've ever seen (up there with the worst Hero Honda and various FMCG ads), with a pilot proclaiming that his Lemon mobile phone is as defect-free as his girlfriend and that he trusts his plane in the sky and his Lemon on terra firma.

Trusting a lemon? How ironic can an advertisement get? :)

A short survey for fans of Telugu cinema

If you enjoy watching Telugu cinema I request you to fill up this short survey - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=wt42TFZZ1xLwTgRZGH2UBw_3d_3d

This is a completely anonymous survey to gather some data for a project I'm doing (along with a few others) on Tollywood.

I also request you to pass the survey link on to friends and family who watch Telugu movies as well. Needless to say, the data gathered would be of great help to us in our project!

Perspective

The last month or so was a pretty tough one for me on a personal, emotional level. Not a day went by where I wasn't brooding over various "issues", wallowing in my own inpetitude almost.

And then I heard of this terrible accident to a neighbour. He is currently undergoing something worse than the worst possible outcome. Suddenly I realized how really trivial my issues are in the grand context of life.

You either face up and move on, or you stop moaning and move on.

In either case, you move on.

An example of bad design

A long, long time ago phishing and virtual keyboards were things of the future. A certain bank called Citibank India allowed customers to choose any password of their liking for their online accounts.

To people like me who understood the importance of strong passwords, this instilled great confidence. I was free to incorporate numbers as well as special characters and make the password as long as I wished. All was well, until a couple of years back.

The prevalence of phishing attacks and Trojan scripts that could log keystrokes meant that every bank worth its salt had to introduce countermeasures. Of the banks that I used Citibank was probably the first out of the gate with a virtual keyboard with randomized placement of keys. And kudos to them. Unfortunately, their keyboard did not contain the space character at all! So I could not use it. Luckily for me, they did provide the option of using a standard keyboard to key in the password (and they still do).

However, I had to safeguard myself against the possibility of them removing the option to key in the password using the keyboard, which means I had to either force them to include the space character in their virtual keyboard (the better option strategically) or change my password so that it does not contain spaces (not a very confidence-inspiring thing).

HDFC was very late with its virtual keyboard, but all credit to them for including almost the space bar in their offering. I am pretty sure some smart product manager in the team that implemented HDFC's system learnt from Citibank's snafu.

A more recent development was that any online payments using Citibank's gateway now required one to have an IPIN. Earlier (again, this was very long ago) one could just process the payment without having to key in the IPIN. Now it's either the IPIN or the date of birth if one didn't have the IPIN. This arrangement is fine. Only, my worst fears did come true. The password entry in the payment gateway does not allow keyboard entry! So I'm now stuck.

For as long as I could I continued keying in my birthday instead. There was a supposedly a limit of 10 instances where one could substitute the birthday information for the IPIN. I'm pretty sure I went over the limit over time (which is good for me but really bad in the grand scheme of things, as it brings moral hazard into play). The rules then changed to something like twice a month for the first few months and then once a month thereafter, with a maximum limit of 4 if I remember correctly. Going by their history I needn't worry, but I really should.

Of course from Aug. 1, 2009 there's going to be the Visa/Master master password mechanism.

To cut to the chase, of the two options that I presented above, obviously I'm too small for Citibank for the first to happen. I did give this feedback once to a CSR, but which big company in this world listens to feedback from its junior-most employees (leave alone customers)? And in which big company in this world has the average employee actually passed on customer feedback to those that could do something about it?

That left me with the somewhat unsafe second option. And here's where things get really interesting. I logged into my account a little while ago to take stock of things, and then proceeded to change the IPIN. Like any good system, it asks me for the old IPIN and the new IPIN, repeated. I key in the necessary stuff and ask to proceed, only to be stopped short saying that special characters aren't allowed.

So here you have a system which was initially designed to be as open as possible, then followed up with an "innovation" that deviated from that initial design (whereas it was well within its possibility to have a perfect fit) and then exaggerated by the fact that certain aspects of the implementation still continue to function with the old design parameters and certain others don't.

And then banks complain that they have systems in place which aren't being used enough.

There is very good basis behind the insight that any system should be designed for customers by customers and not by engineers.

I am not going to particularly relish my phone conversation with the CSR now, for the simple reason that he/she probably will not even understand just what the hell I'm talking about. As far as they know, all "characters" are available on the virtual keyboard, and not many people know that the space character can (and must) be used in passwords.

One weekend at ISB

I'll let the picture do the talking, to begin with -



All of the events fall into 3 categories, broadly - interesting, very interesting and have-to-attend.

This is in addition to 3x weekend assignments (some individual, some groupwork), revising for next week's in-class quizzes and revising (both theory and problem practice) for the mid-terms which are just a week away now.

And then there's personal stuff (swimming or tennis or whatever else, or perhaps music or photography).

And of course there are the weekend all-nighter parties (which unfortunately I couldn't include in the picture above simply because compressing the entire calendar into a small space would make things unreadable).

Not everyone attends everything, but the point I want to make is that this is life at ISB - so much to do in so little time, and weekends are *always* busier than weekdays.

A couple of really neat sites

I came across these in the space of the last 12 hours!

http://www.vidteq.com - driving directions (for Bengaluru) that also include video footage of the drive along the route! Watch out for pop-ups highlighting landmarks en route.

http://www.propiq.com - an online real estate agency with a difference. This is integrated with Google Maps, and includes photos and videos of every property that's listed. And yes, you pay the same one months' worth of commission on rentals (which sucks, but you're getting much more compared to one of those idiot roadside agents).

PropIQ, interestingly enough, is apparently started by a bunch of IIT Guwahati grads from the batch of 1998 (class of 2002)! Not only that, their Koramangala office is -><- that close to the bachelor pad I was put up in between July/Aug. 2004 and Aug. 2007. Lord knows how useful their services might have been to some of my mates who'd house-hunted during July/Aug. 2007 when it was time to vacate the old place.