World’s only sleeping bank website | Hacker News Reader

World’s only sleeping bank website

applyonline.hdfcbank.com

41 pointsramsundhar2052 comments

I remember trying to book a rail ticket in india the night before my flight there, only to find out (through lots of googling) that their system goes down every night for 'maintenance' (I guess to run nightly scripts and stuff without updates happening)

Everybody seemed to know this, everybody seemed to think it's normal, but as a foreigner i thought the site had crashed.

for those interested: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...

World’s only? This was commonplace in Germany maybe 10 years* ago. All (or at least both I knew which were decently large ones: Postbank and NordOstee Sparkasse) Banking websites would shut down every night and usually on Sunday as well. This was very annoying for the night-owl I was back then.

* My perception of time is notoriously bad, but I know for sure it was later than 2005

Sometimes these requirements aren't as ridiculous as they sound.

Some websites are subject to legislation* that requires real people to be available to assist. So if they use local employees to provide assistance, the website ends up being shut down outside of business hours.

This isn't a US bank, but if you see a US government site do this for example, that's usually why.

(* an incidental "benefit" of legislation like this is regulatory capture. It doesn't matter if some code mill like Accenture is the worst technical choice, they already have experience providing warm bodies for the phone line. It raises the bar for getting contracts incredibly high since they're treated as a package deal)

Edit response because I'm being rate limited...

It's all rooted in Section 508: https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/

> Under Section 508, agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information comparable to the access available to others.

Each state has their own extensions and guidance too: https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/state/

And in combination with those state amendments sometimes "access to information comparable to the access available to others" ends up being translated into needing someone to be accessible at all hours that the site is operated.

One thing to remember is that behemoths like Accenture and co also get to tip the scale. The law is vague enough that maybe in theory you could argue that you don't need a live human to meet the requirement... that won't stop incumbents for putting proposals that make it the defacto approach.

>but if you see a US government site do this for example, that's usually why.

Do you have any examples that of US legislation that requires being able to reach a local employee? I can barely get state government departments to respond to me, and there are multiple states I have called during normal business hours that flat out say “we are too busy today, call tomorrow”.

The idea of a government in the US legislating access to a government employee is laughable, based on my experiences.

Here's one for cable companies:

https://www.fcc.gov/media/customer-service-standards

And these banking regulations are too long for me to skim in too much detail, but they mention "telephone" 138 times in the context of various requirements of availability for certain functions and during certain times. One such example:

> 7. Telephone line availability. To satisfy the readily-available standard, the financial institution must provide enough telephone lines so that consumers get a reasonably prompt response. The institution need only provide telephone service during normal business hours. Within its primary service area, an institution must provide a local or toll-free telephone number. It need not provide a toll-free number or accept collect long-distance calls from outside the area where it normally conducts business.

https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-580.html

But more specifically about government requirements, there's stuff like the ADA which requires specific means of access, and there's other things like the USPS USO which, for instance, requires 6 day per week postal service. I'm sure there are others.

I think having “business hours” for websites is an interesting experiment that could help foster a sense of community as people must visit around the same time as everyone else. Also saves on server costs.

Imagine for instance if Hackernews was only open from 12pm to 11pm on weekdays and until 1 AM on weeekends.

Forcing your sleep rhythm on people who have a different one than you for no reason other than a moral crusade isn't a nice thing to do.

Also, you cannot make people feel a sense of community with you by annoying them. Annoying someone will make them dislike you.

Or, it self selects out people who would cost more money in support to the bank. If you’re in their time zone (and awake when they are), the bank could save money by only needing to have support available at certain times.

Similarly, they may not want to have you in their community. So, the community they form might be smaller, but more aligned with what they want.

They are definitely reducing their pool of customers, but maybe they are still attracting the customers they want. Why not let the market decide if they can find enough customers with this approach.

Honestly, the banks I use in the US often do something similar. It’s not as bad as this, and only on their online banking site, not their marketing site. They have maintenance windows late at night (in their time zone), and don’t allow logins during that time. It’s not always every night, but it’s often enough that I’ve noticed (at 3-4am).

> the bank could save money by only needing to have support available at certain times.

You don't need live support to run a website, you can experience this on most websites that have live support available if you go to their site at 1am local.

No, but the signal is, “when the website is up, we’re here”.

I can’t say I’d call this a smart move, but if they still have enough customers to make it worthwhile, I can’t say it’s a bad move. Now, if they can’t get customers or can’t grow because of this, the market will tell them it’s a bad idea.

It’s definitely sub-optimal, from a growth point of view. But so long as it works for them and their customers, why should I care?

Are they the only bank for a region? Or is using them required for some purpose?

I fail to see how that’s a useful signal.

The IRS does this on their site to get an EIN[0]. I don’t know why, but it’s bad UX and restricts the usefulness of the site.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Well like it or not that's how society works. Name me a community that isn't a <large world city> where things operate 24/7. It annoys me too, but when 97% of everyone observes a normal sleep schedule, who's even around to staff and support the nightlife? Why should my hours be forced upon anybody else?

Because we are talking about a server, so the marginal cost of operating is basically electricity. And no one is forcing other bank websites to operate 24/7, it just makes economic sense to provide it since it costs so little.

I would not patronize a business that had to regularly shut down their website, I would wonder what kind of weak IT department they have and why I would want to invest in that.

Same here. Sometimes I pay my bills at night just because that's convenient for me. If Wells Fargo started locking me out of my account outside of business hours (different from standard maintenance windows) I would immediately run to another bank.

Locking bank websites after hours isn't a great proposition for an increasingly cashless society.

People in the optimal time zone will not be annoyed.

Also, which 12 am? Which 1am?

Even if the OP thinks everyone is on US time, there are like 3 different time zones even over there...

> 12pm to 11pm

In which timezone?

Probably Pacific time since that’s where ycombinator is based.

I nominate KST! Its currently 3:20AM (ish)

B&H Photos (a place that sells far more electronics than just photography stuff) disables their ordering system on their website during Shabbat.

Even for Black Friday, which could potentially result in them losing business. I can respect it though.

I've come to appreciate this B&H practice. It reminds me that I have to take breaks too. It hasn't affected my use of B&H much because their shipping is remarkably fast for my location in the US (well outside of NYC).

How would that work across timezones

It would encourage people who live in certain time zones to use the site more than others.

Maybe not quite the same, but https://www.gen-aircraft-hardware.com/ shuts down every Saturday for observation of the sabbath.

A while back I thought about making a chat room website that only allows entry if it's between midnight and 5am in the user's time zone. I was a night owl at the time and liked the idea of making the middle of the night a bit less lonely.

I ended up deciding it would be too much trouble to keep it secure and prevent spam for what amounted to a small idea, but I've been secretly hoping someone else comes up with it someday.

That is how you get businesses that are only open when people are at work.

Florida put queues and business hours on its employment assistance website during the pandemic. Not sure if they've lifted them. But for a while there, it was a excellent deterrent for would-be applicants!

I know a certain govt web services that only operate during working hours (0800-1700). You can't even fill online form outside the hours.

I've seen other smaller banks do the same as recently as a few years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still dozens of banks in the US that still do this. There are 4,200+ banks in the US.

My university’s self-service website would shut down from something like 10pm-4am every single day for batch jobs. This was used for EVERYTHING: Paying into your account, checking grades, registering for classes, webmail, etc. It seemed fairly antiquated at the time (2001 or so).

This reminds me that Merrill Edge offers some money market mutual funds as an alternative to the default settlement account that pays no interest, but the catch is that you have to place buy/sell orders during a subset of market hours.

Australian Bank ANZ closes its FX website services after hours.

When engineering teams are working hard to increase the uptime of their service. This banks approach is funny to ask customers to visit the next day.

Wait until you learn about their approach to getting new customers living abroad (non resident Indians) They’ll ask you to physically mail in all the documents, on your dime, instead of scanning and emailing like a normal person. So I need to spend 100$ to open an account. Unlike American banks who will offer you money to open accounts.

ICICI is the easiest Indian bank to open a NRI account online at. Depending on your country of residence, it can be completely online, not requiring anything to be sent by post

$100 to mail documents?

Do you think they’ll tell you everything they need in one go? Hah :)

Exactly. And I did this when I had a chance to visit their branch in my town. And despite filing everything in front of the person and reconfirming what I was asking for, they somehow managed to send me the checkbook and cards instead of sending them to my parents address in India.

From US to India. DHL charged me that much in past.

This happens in Canada for credit unions and some online banks.

Fun fact, there exists a bug with EQ Bank where a deleted savings account still counts towards the maximum of 5 savings accounts. The customer service agent indicated this was a known bug and had been for some time! I'm planning to leave within the next year.

Why do you need 5 savings accounts?

The US only insured accounts up to 250K so its common to split up accounts for that reason.

what a great problem to have

It's only $250K per account category per bank. So 5 savings accounts would only get $250K in coverage in total.

That isn't how that works.

Its $250k per account type, per institution. So 5 savings accounts at the same institution doesn't increase your insurance over 1.

Some banks will "sweep" the excess funds into partner banks (which would increase protection).

Gotcha that makes sense.

Ouch @ inflation

Were the Canadian banks using US insurance?

Not sure exactly what is meant, but if this includes Certificates of Deposit, CD laddering was a frequent thing when interest rates were high enough to be worthwhile, where you'd want long-term CDs for the highest interest rates, but wan t to get the point of having some fraction of your CDs expire every month so you have liquidity, so you might have 60 5-yr CDs for instance, and somewhat less while you're working your way up to that

This is good for Bitcoin

You mean you can have your BTC transaction executed during the night, while the bank is sleeping?

Yes

Never thought that’s possible. Crypto is amazing.

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