By Peter Cochrane, 3 July 2006 10:45
COMMENT
Written in Bangkok and despatched by wi-fi from one of what seems to be an almost infinite number of free wi-fi service providers here - this time a coffee shop
What would you think of an international company or organisation that had no facility to send or receive emails? Personally I try to avoid doing business with all such organisations and especially those which tell me they only use fax for security reasons.
Worse still are those who will only communicate by letter on security grounds - I avoid working with this group of companies too. What century are these folks in?
You might suppose that no email equates to some small, second-rate, back-street, fly-by-night operation. But - surprise, surprise - it seems the majority of big EU and international banks have no email facility as a policy. Can you imagine a bank with no email? It seems as unlikely as a pub with no beer!
So here I am in Bangkok with a friend trying to sort out a financial issue with a major bank in the EU and I have to deal with a communication turnaround of about one week by letter. They don't seem to be able to cope with fax, let alone email - and all important telephone calls have to be validated by letter later. I'm sure you get the picture - frustration on a stick!
The reality of security risk (in ascending order) actually goes like this: email, fax, letter - with email being the most secure. And yet the perception of the retrograde thinkers is precisely the reverse. Written and printed material is so easy to intercept, so easy to fake, it beggars belief that anyone still persists in this Dickensian activity. 'Pass me another quill pen, this one is blunt!'
How long before these and other institutions get with the programme, or better still, fold altogether? Judging by the attitudes of the young and increasingly the older customers, I'd say less than 10 years before they will be in serious trouble. Modern life demands modern technology. People have no choice and neither do banks and companies. The customers will vote with their keyboards!
And so the next step for me is to close down this EU-based international bank account and move all the assets and services to one providing email access.
Comments
There are 11 comments. Join the discussion
1. Jim Davies
It's not just the banks. The UK Government is largely incapable of dealing with classified data by email, so it has to go on snailback.
2. Richard
Try UKVisas:
Rude unhelpful government call-centre which put callers on hold for over 30 minutes (on an expensive 0845 number) before a "human" operative finally answers but refuses any help or information, saying that all enquiries must be put in writing!
No email address.
They claim to respond to written enquiries within 20 days, but then fail to reply or even to acknowledge receipt of enquiries: Apparently they're "too busy."
Banks have a lot to learn!
3. anonymous
The "no email" policy is nothing to do with technology (of course they use it internally!), but about their attitude to customer service.
Banks talk a lot about customer "service", but in reality want to reduce us all to dealing with machines, whether it's an automated call centre, email banking or just ATMs.
Cochrane's problem is the same as trying to find a bank where you can talk to a person at a branch which is accountable for your dealings with them.
Not only have banks not, apparently, discovered email - they've decided that even the telephone or any means of identifying a named individual who will take responsibility for YOUR account, is to be avoided, at all costs.
4. anonymous
Have you ever tried dealing with the UK police. They can recieve emails but will not send them. Bizzare in the extreme. But it's not as if I have the option of switching to an alternative law and order provider who is more technologically advanced.
5. anonymous
Couple of months ago I received a phishing email asking for details to my bank account. Rather amateurish in that I don't have an account at that bank. Tried to forward it to them as they should be interested but they didn't have any email address I could send it to.
6. Phil Darby
I'm having similar problems to Peter Someone with the time should set up a web site to collect and display the e-mail addresses of key managers at bank HQs so that people can mail them with instructions. Maybe it would persuade them to think again about this policy. The trouble is we are all too busy dealing with stuff like this to take the necessary action.
7. Malcolm Kenward
I was working in a subsidiary of one of the big 4 banks in the late 1990s and I sat on the Banks Internet forum. At the time the major concern regarding email was being infected by viruses. We experienced several instances where the bank's or a subsidary's network was infected by viruses, and as our networks were all linked together, the total impact on the group's business could have been massive. It's possible that this remains their major concern, even though virus detection has improved drammatically.
8. Geoffrey Mullen
My company's bank is two miles from our office, but if we need to phone them we dial a national call number which connects us to India, who pass us bak to the local branch.
9. Penny Calder
The one I just couldn't understand is PayPal, which lives by the online communication. If you invoke their dispute resolution service having received a faulty item 'significantly not as described' on eBay, they ask you to FAX a copy of a report from a repairer with an estimate of the repair costs - and won't accept an email attachment. Worse, they take days to come back to tell you the attachment is unacceptable, leaving you no time to sort it out as they impose a 10-day slice of time for the process.
10. anonymous
Email and snail mail are both easy to steal or copy. Two security advantages of snail mail over email are as follows:
1) Envelops make it difficult to know what's in a snail mail, which makes it harder to know which items to steal. With email, you can automatically find items of value.
2) Envelops require resealing, which is time-consuming and limits your ability to steal mail.
Ironically, the only reason that email appears to be safer than snail mail is that banks and other companies do not conduct sensitive conversations with that medium. If they did, criminal gangs would seek employment (more often) from ISPs.
Finally, fax is certainly the most secure of the three channels because it's almost impossible to intercept (unless you're NSA.)
11. anonymous
I like the secure e-mail used by the UK bank Smile and the Nationwide building society. These work as secure channels because you are logged-in to their web-site already. Therefore there is no problem with phishing.