Comment by qsi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qsi | Hacker News Reader

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For context: DBS is Singapore's biggest bank, and this outage affects most (all?) electronic banking services made through the app or website, including the popular PayNow transfers (usually small transactions made by scanning a QR code, or sending it to the recipient by phone number).

I am also not really surprised as my experience of DBS IT as a customer is mediocre at best. Trying to apply for a credit card online was a comedy of poor UX. Errors preventing the submission, but not marked, files to upload could have a max of 20 characters in the file name, trying to re-upload failed until you deleted the failed previous upload (not explained), and best of all, their "We value your feedback" webform does not accept "special characters" such as apostrophe. "Your website doesn't work" cannot be submitted because of "doesn't." Really. This was a few months ago.

Oh, did I mention the DBS app takes forever to load? There's other stuff I am trying to forget.

As they're the biggest bank here they can offer some attractive packages, which is why I have put up with it...

Their customer service UX is also hilariously bad. You can send a message to the bank from the app, which still makes sense, but to read the response, you:

- need to wait 3-5 business days

- eventually get an email notifying you that there is a response and directing you to the chat to read it (!?)

- to access chat, you need to complete a separate authentication process that requires SMS (can't use the digital token used everywhere else)

- and then you finally get a chat bubble containing the precious response.

- The kicker? If you want to respond, you need to do all of this again and get routed to another random agent with no access to your previous messages, since there is no concept of threading at all!

I had to do that to unsubscribe from their marketing email lists. They initially asked me to provide my bank account number to do it, too.

Eventually a person intervened and took me off their mailing list manually.

IDK why Singapore didnt make having an unsubscribe link mandatory yet.

It does: http://www.imda.gov.sg/for-community/Infocomm-regulation-and...

Unfortunately the Act is aimed at out and out spam, not marketing from companies where you actually are a customer.

Ought to have applied to me then since I was an ex-customer.

Sounds like most customer interactions in Singapore that don't perfectly fit into the standard workflow to me.

The DBS UX is absolute garbage. Their android app is extremely slow, and is full of (probably?) iOS patterns. It's almost like they decided to implement their own cross-platform framework, but poorly. (I apologize in advance if they are in fact using someone else's cross-platform framework, but poorly.)

Oh, and their web internet banking doesn't allow pasting passwords, because that's how we do security in 2021.

I've written software for them in the past. I... wouldn't say they have high standards. At least when I was working on systems like this (many years ago), a worrying amount of code was written for them by overworked contractors like myself.

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