I've used Citizens Bank before for business reasons and their UI is probably one of the worst I have ever seen. I don't understand why consumers get such good stuff and enterprises get such crap.
In the case of b2b, it’s more complicated. You’re selling to office administrators, whose goal is to score the best deal for the company. Since they aren’t the primary users of the product, stuff like UX doesn’t matter as much as cost.
Best illustrated by Slack, which thought they could sell to businesses based on a beautiful UI, but their market was dominated by Microsoft Teams, which could sell better to enterprises.
Which is probably one reason why Slack is looking to sell to Salesforce.
My point being I don't think Slack's positioning was "chat but prettier". The fact Teams is more dominant now seems more to do with bundling.
Teams dominates because Microsoft gave it away for free to those who were already paying Microsoft.
But, you know what? Nobody cares about my opinion! You are exactly right: the people who make these decisions about what software the university "runs on" are at a far higher level, and have far more clout. Their incentives are totally misaligned with mine -- I use linux as a daily driver, and write highly mathematical software. I am exactly _not_ the target audience of these things, because, frankly, I can support myself: if something's broken, I fix it -- and don't consume IT's time. The people who _do_ however, are all of the admin staff, many of whom have professional backgrounds elsewhere, and think this is the way the world works. And they get promoted, and end up in managerial roles that make purchasing decisions at a high level. Hence, Teams.
But hey, nobody was ever fired for using Microsoft.
Sure but until the UI is so bad that you end up accidentally sending out money you didn't intend to, it is important.
Separately, In the business UI I used previously with Citizens it was so easy to get locked out of your account (and I had no time for phone calls, which was the only way to unlock it after that) that so many payments were made late because I had no other choice; my schedule was already full and the payment would only be made when I could schedule time for that stupid phone call.
That led to delays and late fees of sorts, and that is money as well, all because of a bad UX.
One day, a novice-level Java error in Oracle’s code caused a multi-day outage requiring data to be restored from backups and reloaded to get any functionality back and several months of that group deploying duct tape to get everything working.
For a consumer app, people would leave in droves as one star reviews poured in. In this case, they solved this by inviting the relevant VP to a football game in the corporate box with the account rep, both of the same fraternity, and starting that Monday nobody in management talked about the outage publicly again.
The business banking portal is often much worse than the consumer one.
Nowhere in the article (which I read in its entirety) does it answer the above reply's question. "Do companies consider good UI a competitive advantage when looking for a commercial bank or lender?" I don't know. But that's not addressed in the article.
My guess is that it probably isn't a huge consideration. Very few people interact with these interfaces. Maybe one or two controllers at a company would ever log into this. Even CEOs and top management would never actually log into these accounts directly. They are going to get their information from internal reports and BI dashboards. So I bet no one really cares. If Citi offers a $400M loan at 1.1% interest and JP Morgan offers the same loan at 1.3% interest, my guess is that that company is going with Citi. I doubt UI/UX makes a difference here. Although in the consumer world it does have an impact which is why we have seen many banks improving their apps and websites lately to compete in the consumer banking space.
Ive gone so far as to open 4 accounts with different banks to do actual tests
The biggest issue i found is that no bank offers a "free trial" of its own to facilitate discovery.
I have filled at least a dozen firms twice becuase the bank wants "wet ink" signatures
I had to overlook those instances just so i could test the UI, but honestly, its an exercise in supreme patience and i am afraid my whole effort will be pointless. I suspect all 5 banks will be equally bad.