Bryn, I have been generally happy with smile. Since online is the only place you get to do things with them they tend to have it all worked out. The only thing I dislike about their web interface is that they make the back button log you out “for security reasons”, but at least you can do everything you need to do in a fairly sane manner.

I should say that last month they tried to charge me £20.53 for something I don’t think they should have charged me for. It’s a long and not very interesting story so I won’t go into it, all I will say is I have no time for people who complain about their overdraft charges and there was more to it than that! Anyway I complained in an online message and they removed it.

Being a treehugger, the Co-op’s ethical policy also appeals to me.

Oh, but if we’re on the subject of how not to do things, I’d been trying to use the “e-banking” feature of my new Abbey business account since last Friday, and after putting in my login details I would get a page that said this every time:


ANIB JSP Diagnostic Page

Background
to : from (localhost) (host )

Error
bean error not found within scope

Additional
Content Length:
Content Type:
Remote User:


The site had also been occasionally displaying “temporary error” messages over the weekend so I left it until this week thinking they were having problems. After trying again on Tuesday and having the same message, and also confirming with another Abbey user that they could log in to theirs, I decided to call them and ask wtf.

The answer is that they have not yet received my security information that I posted back last week, so I havent yet been “setup on the system”. Was I supposed to deduce that from “bean error not found within scope”?