Bank of Queensland blues

2007-09-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

TO: Banking Ombudsman, Re: case 90290

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for your letter of 7th.

It is my contention that the term "telegraphic" IMPLIES immediate transfer. As it was, a more honest description would have been "Delayed". I think this is straight deception.

Show that you are not just a front for the banks and try to approach this from the customer's viewpoint. If you perform your functions poorly you will be replaced by a statutory body. I will certainly be making representations to that effect when the new government comes to power

2007-08-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

TO: Banking Ombudsman

Dear Sir,

Last month I went in to the Stones Corner branch of the Bank of Qld to arrange for a "telegraphic transfer" of some money to a UK account.

How long would YOU think a "telegraphic transfer" would take to go through? Silly little people like me would think that it would be like the internet -- instantaneous. But NO! I was told it would take "several days"

I could see no reason for this so wrote to the BOQ about it and got back a reply from some drongo named Gavin Watts. The full limit of Mr Watts’s interpersonal skills was to tell me that the bank was legally entitled to do what it did!

I subsequently wrote to the BOQ chairman about the matter but was ignored.

Blind Freddy knows that money transfers these days are electronic and instantaneous so I can only conclude that the hold the BOQ put on my money was to earn them a few cents of interest while they held it. Since I paid them $30.00 for an instantaneous service I am most aggrieved by this pettiness and believe that I should be refunded the $30 I paid for a service which was not delivered.

2007-07-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

TO: Chair, Bank of Qld

Dear Mr Roberts,

As a long-term BOQ shareholder, I like to do a certain amount of business with the bank in order to check on stupidities in the bank's operations. And, as you know, I find plenty. I am sure you appreciate the opportunities my comments give you to upgrade your operations.

I would therefore like to draw your attention to another stupidity in your bank's internet service.

When users log on to inspect details of their account, they are given several options for what is displayed. They can see the last week's transactions, the last month's transactions etc.

But that does not apply to Visa card accounts. "Since last statement" is the only option given.

Why? If you are going to provide an internet service why can you not do it properly?

Note that I have NOT directed this letter to Gavin Watts. His idea of customer relations is to tell people that the bank has a legal right to do what it does -- full stop. Is he the best you can do? He sure needs lessons in how to win friends and influence people.

2007-07-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

TO: Gavin Watts, Bank of Qld

Dear Mr Watts,

For a manager of customer relations, you are most disappointing. I have your totally irrelevant letter of 11th. I asked for an explanation, not a legal argument.

Please try again. You ARE allowed to think, you know. You have shown you can use italics. See if you can do more.

Absent an intelligent response from you I will have to refer the matter to the Banking Ombudsman. He is generally sympathetic to requests for information and explanation

2007-07-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

TO: Chair, Bank of Qld

Dear Mr Roberts,

I was today once again foolish enough to use a BOQ service. It looks like I am going to have a lot to raise at the next AGM.

I went in to your Stones Corner branch and arranged for a "telegraphic transfer" of some money to a UK account.

How long would YOU think a "telegraphic transfer" would take to go through? Silly little people like me would think that it would be like the internet -- instantaneous.

But NO! I was told it would take "several days"

Please explain

2007-05-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

TO: V.C. Dougherty, MD staff, BOQ

Dear Ms Dougherty

Thank you for your letter of 11th.

May I suggest that there is a simple way for the bank not to be called "boneheads"? Don't act that way.

Apropos of that I would like to ask you just one question:

Why was I allowed to transfer $5,000 out of my account one day without a token but next day I was allowed to transfer not one cent? Certainly not $5,000.

You can guess what I think of that great and unexpected inconvenience to which you subjected me.

I think a policy change on that is clearly called for. Don't you?

Your absurdly complex token system has simply persuaded me that I should no longer keep significant funds in my BOQ account. I was for some time keeping substantial funds there for the sake of convenience but since you have taken the convenience away I have taken the funds away.

2007-05-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

TO: Chair, Bank of Qld

Dear Mr Roberts,

I must be a hero of persistence. Once again I have been victimized by gross BOQ stupidity. You have sometimes been able to help in the past so I am alerting you to this matter too.

I have been accustomed to using internet banking on my A/c 90-REDACTED. Transfers to other banks are however limited to $5000. So I put in to raise the limit to $15,000. The new limit was approved.

End of story? No way! Not with the boneheaded BOQ. Now I cannot transfer ANYTHING at all! The upgrade has turned into a severe inconvenience. I am told that I now have to go into a branch to get a new password or otherwise get stuffed.

I am going in alright -- to draw out all my money

Yours Incredulously

2007-04-16T06:25:00.001-07:00

Re: Chq A/c 90-XXXXXX [Number given in original letter]

Dear Sirs/Mesdames

I note that the Bankcard attached to the above A/c has gone "poof" at some stage.

Please issue me with a replacement card of some sort

Do NOT ask me to fill out any forms. I have already filled out enough forms for two lifetimes. Seeing you made credit available to me for many years, you ALREADY have enough info to issue me with a new card.

I understand that a refusal to fill out forms will throw your bureaucratic mind into a tizz so perhaps you should pass this letter onto your department for dealing with high net worth individuals. The dividends flowing into my cheque A/c would tell an intelligent person that my share portfolio is worth over a million dollars

2005-12-21T06:31:00.000-08:00

TO: Neil Roberts, CHAIRMAN, BOQ

Dear Mr Roberts

Why does your bank make it so hard for your customers to use the internet? I have just spent half an hour on the phone to your staff trying to find out how to use the internet to make money transfers from my account and could not get past a bonehead called Jason who had all the helpfulness of a cracked record and who refused to put me on to anyone else with more brains. Everybody else was "in a meeting", allegedly. I do wish you would instruct your staff to stop using that threadbare lie when talking to customers. He promised to get someone more senior to ring me back but that too was the usual fraud. So I am writing to you. Why I should have to is beyond me but it seems the only thing to do that offers some chance of an intelligent response.

My A/c is 90 REDACTED and I have long ago set up my transfer limit as you require. Why you require that is also beyond me. I have a Commonwealth Bank A/c that put no such obstacle in front of me.

When I logged on to your internet site, however, and clicked "transfer to anyone", I got a page that had no means of entering to whom I wanted to make the transfer. A window dropped down but I could not type anything into it.

I therefore rang your helpline and asked what I had to do to enter a payee but your Jason refused to tell me unless I had a confirmation code. As far as I know I threw away the code as soon as I had entered it into your system as required.

In summary:
1). You put up stupid obstacles to transfers
2). Your computer system does not do what it says
3). Your staff refuse to help

And you claim that your bank is particularly customer-oriented! Please investigate and advise.

2005-05-01T06:58:00.000-07:00

TO: John Nilas, Customer Relations, BOQ

Dear Mr Nilas

Thank you for your letter of 14th April. You must be an escapee from the Public Service. The message in your letter very clearly is: "There's no reason for it. It's just policy" Do you really think I or anybody else is going to be happy with that response to a complaint? I have pointed out two idiotic policies of the bank (No names on receipts and the barring of credit-card payments of fees) WITH THE GENERAL IDEA THAT YOU MIGHT CONSIDER CHANGING THEM. And if you are too wooden for that, you could at least have the courtesy to explain to me the wonderful wisdom behind the existing policies.

You must WANT shareholders to embarrass your chairman at the AGM

2002-08-30T06:28:00.000-07:00

TO: Letters Editor, Courier Mail

Dear Sir,

The Bank of Queensland in its advertising claims that it puts people first. Ha! Ha!
They have now adopted the cheapskate and very inconvenient practice of printing their cheque A/c statements on both sides. They clearly put pennypinching first, not people. I asked if we could have the option of returning to the old single-sided statements but “No” was the answer.

2002-08-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

Reply from Ms Heffernan

In response to your request that we give customers a choice of how many sides of their statement they want their transactions printed on I advise that we do not currently plan to provide this facility and I am not aware of any financial institution in Australia currently offering this service. As I said in my email of 9 August we will continue to listen to what our customers say about this change and make modifications when representative of customer feedback. That is, if we receive sufficient feedback indicating that we should print transaction details on only one side of our statement pages we will change back to that approach. In relation to item 3 of your email of 1 August, I did not realise that this was an outstanding matter between us. I passed on your feedback concerning your experience with the Queen Street branch staff to the Regional Manager and I apologise for not having advised you of this. Dr Ray, if I can be of any further assistance to you please do not hesitate to contact me.

2002-08-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Ms Heffernan

Thank you for your comprehensive response, which I find generally reasonable.

I STILL however am exceedingly cheesed off by your cheapskate procedure of printing statements both sides. The idea that all customers should keep their statements in a ring-binder is just so incredibly authoritarian. I don't. And your new statements are a real pest to me. You remind me of Joe Stalin saying that there is complete freedom of speech in Russia as long as you agree with him. People are all DIFFERENT, you know: There is no Commo uniformity in Queensland. Could you not at least give customers an option of how many sides they want printed? I will definitely raise this at the next AGM if you do not.

2002-08-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

From: jennifer.heffernan@boq.com.au To: jonjayray@hotmail.com

I refer to your recent correspondence. Firstly thank you for your feedback
and suggestions, it is important that we stay in touch with the views and
experiences of our customers and shareholders.

1. Linking of Bankcard account for Internet Banking

I agree that providing a total view of a customer's banking facilities
including credit cards would solve the issue. Currently credit card details
are held in a separate system however there are ways in which the fact that
a customer holds a credit card be held in the main banking system by
linking the card details to a transaction or savings account. It is
actually timely that you raise this as we about to reissue these procedures
to staff as recent events, including your feedback, have indicated this
procedure is not as well understood as it should be.

2. Length of account number to log onto internet

Bank of Queensland Customer Access Number is 10 digits (including the 3
leading zeros which are optional for entry). In banking these numbers can
range anywhere between 8 to 16 digits. Whilst the terms and conditions
require that the security of the Personal Access Code be safeguarded they
do not prohibit customers from writing down their Customer Access Number.
Customers are free to select their own Personal Access codes provided that
this meets minimum security requirements. I have been unable to locate any
bank which allows customers to select their own account number or name.

There are a number of reasons why I think that this would not work in a
banking environment:

. the customer selected name approach does not allow customers to change
their account number once they have made their initial selection. For
example, Hotmail do not allow customers to change their sign in name once
it has been selected. If you wish to change your name you have to close all
your accounts. Unlike Hotmail, banking practice would dictate that we can
not use this discarded number immediately.

.the customer selected name approach requires a large set of available
codes. For example, Hotmail are required to support up to 64 digit account
numbers for their customers. There currently isn't any banking software
available that I am aware of to support this approach.

3. Exiguous Bankcard Particulars

I agree with you that the current level of Bankcard particulars available
is not optimal. Ideally we would like to be able to provide up to 120 days
of transaction information as we do for other accounts however our card
system is not currently configured to enable this. This is one of the many
enhancements and improvements that we will make over time to our Internet
Banking service. A continuing balance facility is also in this category. We
already provide a current balance facility on the Transaction History page.

4. New Look BOQ statement

We were not trying to inconvenience our customers - our objective was to
modernise and update the look and feel of our statements. In addition where
statement details would have generated a second individual sheet the
details are printed on the statement reverse in a manner consistent with
filing in a two ringed statement binder. This is a reasonably common
approach in the industry.

Dr Ray, you are right when you say that we advertise the fact that we are
customer friendly but I would disagree with your view that this is a lie.
What being customer friendly means to us at the Bank of Queensland is that
we may not always get it right but we listen to our customers, are
respective of their views and that we try to meet their needs to the best
of our ability and the resources available to us . Inevitably we can not be
all things to all customers and I regret that you have such a negative
impression of our statement initiative. All I can say is that we will
continue to listen to what our customers say to us about this change and
make modifications when representative of customer feedback.

Once again thank you for writing to me and do not hesitate to contact me
with any further suggestions or feedback

2002-08-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Tran history

Ms Heffernan

The online transaction history that you give for a bankcard A/c is pretty exiguous. Could you not at least give an opening balance as well as a current balance? Pretty elementary, I would have thought.

2002-08-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

New statement

Dear Ms Heffernan

I cannot believe it! I have just got my first “new look” BOQ cheque A/c statement with half the transactions printed on the back. Are you deliberately TRYING to inconvenience your customers? I will have to raise this at the BOQ AGM if you persist with it. What the h*** were you thinking of when you came up with that lulu?

It makes a total mockery of your advertising that you are customer friendly. Or are you a believer in the Goebbels “big lie” technique -- that what you say can be the opposite of the truth as long as you say it loudly enough? How about changing your advertising to read: “We cut all possible corners regardless of customer convenience”? That would be a more accurate reflection of your orientation as far as I can see.

It is of a piece with your ridiculous assertion that you do not need to have running balances in your online statements because they are not really statements. Technically correct, perhaps, but hardly customer-oriented.

2002-08-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Ms Heffernan,

Thank you for your reply. I am glad you have given consideration to the matters I raised and will just about leave it at that.

As a Bank of Qld shareholder, however, I have a vested interest in seeing the bank run intelligently so I will leave you with a few more small suggestions which could, I believe, help.

1. For a start, I was glad to see on my visit to your Queen St branch today that the safety deposit area was secured by use of the steel vault door. You obviously have listened to my concerns in that matter. Having a foot-thick steel door left ajar all day certainly looked like a third-world level of care.

2. Your counter staffer DID TRY to link my Bankcard A/c to my net facility. Finding out why her attempt failed is surely worth investigating. I have observed in the past that counter staff always have difficulty tracing a bankcard that is used to provide a line of credit for a cheque a/c. One would have thought that this information would be shown as part of the cheque A/c details but obviously it is not. Remedying that would probably fix the internet linking problem too.

3. I wrote to the bank earlier on about the warding key debacle in the safety deposit area at your Queen st branch. I could not understand why a spare warding key could not have been used to replace the "broken" one. The explanation I got from branch staff was a farrago of nonsense and the explanation I got in response to my written enquiry was no better. I did however today discuss the matter with your locksmith and he made sense. As there seems to be a continuing problem in this area, may I suggest that you arrange for the locksmith to answer future queries about the matter? Your staff are certainly not up to it.

4. Like other banks, you ask people to use a long account number to log on to your internet facility. How do you think people remember these long numbers? They don't. They write it on a piece of paper somewhere near their computer. That is asking for trouble. You are encouraging and facilitating fraud by making people use these long numbers.

So be a devil and set the pace to reform of this most unsatisfactory situation. Allow people to choose their own identifying name or number -- like most internet sites do. If so many non-bank sites do it, it cannot be too difficult.

2002-08-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

From: jennifer.heffernan@boq.com.au, To: jonjayray@hotmail.com

Dear Dr Ray,

I refer to your email of 31st July, in which you raised four issues and I
address each of these below:

1. "I know of NO paper bank statement that omits running balances. If
you want to wean your customers off paper and get them on to the net
instead, you are hardly going to do it by offering REDUCED service. You
should be offering better service."

The Transaction History function provided within our Internet Banking
service is not a statement. The benefit that this function provides to
our customers is that you can see all transactions on your account,
including transactions made on the same day. This is regardless of
whether the transactions occurred on your account since or before your
last statement was issued.

At Bank of Queensland, we have no plans to migrate customers off the
standard issue statements that we continue to provide free of charge to
all customers residing in Australia. The Transaction History function
provided free as a part of the Internet Banking service does not replace
a statement and you will continue to receive standard issue paper
statements free of charge. Fees apply to non-standard issue statements,
customer statements issued at the branch and statements mailed to
overseas addresses.

We do not provide access to previously issued statements as a part of
our Internet Banking service. As I mentioned in my letter of 29th of
July, "We knew that we would not be able to provide on-line archives of
previously issued statements for some time, so we decided to provide a
minimum of 120 days of transaction history."

2. "If you offer a 'Contact us' facility you should provide it. Doh!"

We do currently provide a 'contact us' facility to our customers. I
understand that you used this service to contact me yesterday. We built
it this way to ensure that anyone, anywhere could contact us, regardless
of whether they were registered for Internet Banking, whether they had
lost their password or whether they were a customer or not.

We are however, looking at a way of extending this feature of our
website to customers who are signed on to Internet Banking. I hope that
we can offer this feature soon.

3. "Backspacing is elementary on the internet. Get with it!"

All Australian banks, except for one have disabled the browser 'Back'
button. The bank which does not disable the 'Back' button instead
displays a 'Page Expired' message, signs the customer out and asks them
to log in again. The reason why Bank of Queensland and other banks
disable the 'Back' button is that using it causes the link established
between the browser page and the Bank's back-end systems to disconnect.
This link, referred to technically as session management, is an
extremely important part of how we ensure secure transactions can occur.

When you are using Internet Banking, electronic links are established
and exchanged between the bank's systems and your browser. Given the
technology of the browser and the internet, the use of the back button
re-sends a previously issued set of codes that appear to the bank's
systems to be an unauthorised attempt to duplicate a valid session.
Therefore, no Australian bank allows the use of the 'Back' button.

However, as I understood from your letter dated 15th July you were
actually looking for a way to look at a previously displayed transaction
history page. As I stated in my letter dated 19th July, we will look at
providing this functionality should we receive regular requests from
other customers for the same functionality. Obviously, those requests
that we receive more frequently will be looked at with higher priority.

4. "I am once again amazed that I had to write to your chairman to get my
Bankcard statement online. Is that the only way customers can get it done?
Have you done anything to check why the branch did not carry out this
simple request?"

I don't believe that our customers need to write to the Chairman to
organise simple requests like this. I am very pleased that you are the
only customer who has felt that he needed to write to the Chairman about
our Internet Banking service. I have spoken to the branch manager
regarding the matter and she has assured me that you have never spoken
to her regarding the matter, or written or phoned her regarding the
matter.

As we did not receive a written request from your to add your Bankcard
to your Internet Banking profile, I can only assume that you have made a
verbal request to a staff member who has not acted on that request. I
apologise for this having occurred.

The branch manager has assured me that you can talk to her any time
should you have any issues, concerns or questions regarding the service
provided by her staff. Her name is Lisa Brien and her phone number is
3397 1527. Please feel free to visit Lisa in person, phone or write to
her regarding any issues, concerns or questions that you may have. Our
branch managers are there to help our customers and meet their needs
face-to-face.

We want you to feel that banking with the Bank of Queensland means great
personal service and value for money. I hope that I have helped with your
concerns and I thank you for banking with us for more than seventeen years.

Jennifer Heffernan
General Manager

2002-07-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

To: Jennifer Heffernan, General Manager, Online Banking, Bank of Qld

Dear Ms Heffernan

Thank you for your full response of 29th to my letter of 15th July about Net banking. I am however still bemused that I had to write to the Chairman of the Board to get your response. There seems to be a big gap between your advertising slogans (“putting the customer first”) and your actual practice.

My further comments:

I know of NO paper bank statement that omits running balances. If you want to wean your customers off paper and get them on to the net instead, you are hardly going to do it by offering REDUCED service. You should be offering better service.

If you offer a “Contact us” facility you should provide it. Doh!

Backspacing is elementary on the internet. Get with it!

I am once again amazed that I had to write to your chairman to get my Bankcard statement online. Is that the only way customers can get it done? Have you done anything to check why the branch did not carry out this simple request?