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Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

Context: DBS https://www.dbs.com.sg/ is the largest bank in Southeast Asia and very, very proud of being "The World's Best Digital Bank":

https://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/how-dbs-became...

Note their own "GANDALF" acronym, composed of Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook and, you guessed it, DBS.

Most companies in Singapore also pay out wages at the end of the month, so it's an extra bad time to be down.

On the other hand, their slogan is "Live More, Bank Less", so at least they're living up to the second half.

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If they put themselves in the same league as LinkedIn, that explains a lot.

Shittiest website I ever need to use from a technical point of view, never mind “content” and dodgy hard-sell techniques.

They had to get the acronym to work, and presumably "LinkedIn's-owner" sounded a bit forced.

It might sound repetitive that recently only I wrote a similar comment. Sometimes it makes me wonder why are people in FB or LinkedIn put on a pedestal when the output (we can see) is bad quality websites and apps. Maybe I’m trivialising the problem considering the scale involved but still makes one wonder.

Purely from a technology point of view, I find Facebook and Twitter far superior. They "just work" (not that I'm a heavy user, and certainly not endorsing the business they serve).

LI is slow, buggy, crashy, search works poorly etc. The only thing they have going for them is the size of the network.

Twitter often fails to load on mobile browsers, with some error that sounds like "rate limiting" or similar (I forget the exact message).

I've heard of other people having the same problem, so it's not just me either.

Twitter videos for e.g. is pretty dumb. It tries to do adaptive bitrate for a 10s video. By or before the time the video quality improves, the video has already ended.

Also before the recent PWA app, their mobile site used to very bad. PWA sure also crashes sometimes.

Facebook newsfeed itself is so buggy to me but maybe it’s because of all the trackers are blocked. Maybe it works well if they are not blocked.

DBS is a bank that has spent a lot of money on marketing that "Digital Bank" image, but is really old fashioned in all the wrong places.

Not a fan of their video-teller booths/machine? I was impressed and I'd be surprised if, even today, many retail banks have something similar. Obviously good cost-saving for them, but seems like a reasonable solution to banking with a new (younger) demographics.

I've tried using it once to IIRC, replace a debit card in the wee hours of night, but some functionality seemed to have been disabled after midnight.

The idea of needing to go somewhere to talk to a teller seems fairly old fashioned, whether or not that's done via a video stream. My bank doesn't even have physical buildings - you just do everything through the app.

> The idea of needing to go somewhere to talk to a teller seems fairly old fashioned, whether or not that's done via a video stream.

I'm guessing that it's probably the best compromise they could think of to authenticate a person's identity, mainly for services that need to be performed instantly like debit card replacements.

Singapore has a great GovTech system that provides identity verification in a really nice way.

GovTech's SingPass has horrendous UX too: they refuse to allow the toggling of password visibility — which is pretty important when designing for accessibility, because the elderly sometimes have trouble entering their password, because it'll fail some security audit.

I think I’ve gone to a bank teller exactly once in the last decade, and it was for something that, for risk reasons, they required a paper form submitted on person for (large transfer for house purchase), so I’m not sure I see the point. What do people go to tellers for these days? Most smaller branches here don’t even have them anymore.

I guess we're limiting our discussion to digitization (so we can ignore any accessible issues with digital-only services).

The obvious thing that comes to mind is getting issues resolved immediately, e.g. debit card replacement (which is why I used their video teller machine). I've also gone to the bank for cashier's order (not sure why these can't be ordered online, but again, this could be time sensitive). And I go there occasionally to get large stacks of $2 for tips. I also do currency exchange in person (though not from a bank, bad rates, but I think it generally answers the "why do we need physical locations")

> I've also gone to the bank for cashier's order (not sure why these can't be ordered online, but again, this could be time sensitive).

It might not be what you're looking for, but cheques can be issued online using DBS internet banking [1].

[1] https://www.dbs.com.sg/personal/ibanking/faq/online-cheque.p...

On some level, you gotta give 'em credit for trying.

A couple of years ago, they tried to recruit me into a platforms/SRE role for their consumer banking services. There seemed to be a pretty clear desire to Modernize All The Things! to do things the way Google/Facebook/etc. do it.

I think the first part is true as well, I mean, a lot of people are probably feeling quite alive these past two days.

I like your sarcastic tone a lot, lol.

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