Wednesday, January 9, 2013

CITI Bank, Singapore - A Global bank that can't get technology right

If you guys ever used CITI bank internet in Singapore, you'd agree with me. Their internet banking be it for Savings or Credit Card sucks big time.
I've a minor problem and I tried to reach them via "contact us". That's where my pain started. So after typing all the content it simply displays a weird and painfully sarcastic message saying that there is a "invalid character " in the message (??) and moves to a different page.

The error message is classic too.

Sorry. One of the characters you entered is not allowed by the system for security reasons. For your protection, your request has been stopped.

It says that "your protection". It's a smart way of saying, CITI IT system is centuries old and no one knows how to make it work. So the system crashed or the database can't understand what to do. So we'll kick you out but to make it look good, we'll put a sweet message.

So after that if you try again by thinking may be the database can't handle characters like "" or ' or ; or () you are wrong. I've removed all the special characters but the error remains the same. By the way did I say that right after the error message it'll kick you out. So you need to login again on the slowest ever banking system in Singapore to face the same issue


Is it a smart way to discourage people from reaching CITI Bank? or simply the IT department stopped believing in upgrading?

In any case the experience made me so frustrated that it became the final straw. Seems like Stan Chart or home grown OCBC are much better in terms of support / service.






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