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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

Barclays online offerings are pretty good as well, depends on how much you can ignore their slightly shady ethics when it comes to investment banking. They also weathered the last financial meltdown a bit better than the rest, so there's that.

UK is definitely missing a trustworthy, ethically sound bank though.

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What about The Co-Operative Bank?

http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/servlet/Satellite/11932063...

Got there seconds ahead of me. Co-op (and Smile, their internet alter-ego) seem to be the ethically best choice. And their customer service is the best of anyone, ever.

Ditto. I have had an account with them for some years, and have always been incredibly pleased with their customer service.

As another commenter wrote, their online banking is "primitive", but it's usable.

I'm assuming it'll get upgraded when they move over to the lloyds tsb infrastructure. I have no idea how good that is.

I've heard negative things about their online banking and customer service, but those were a while ago so I'm not sure what the state of play is now. Could be worth a try, I do like their ethics.

I must admit I haven't personally used them so I can't comment on either of those things, but from a purely ethical point of view you are not going to get much better from a leading bank.

Their online banking is fairly primitive, but it does the job. One thing which I find particularly funny is that if you want to have a standing order which continues indefinitely, you have to put a value of 999 in the "number of payments" field. I would have thought having a tickbox which says "Continue payments indefinitely" would be better from a user perspective.

Their (Smile) online banking is "not bad for a financial institution", and if that sounds like damning with faint praise ...

Particular nits are: - pressing the browser 'back' button triggers an immediate logout - they don't use email for anything except to tell you they've sent you a "secure message" that you have to log in and read - no data export (though there are greasemonkey scripts)

Their customer service I've found to be fine unless you want anything usual, complicated, or to be done in a timely fashion. Much like any large company, really

I've also found the customer service to be pretty good for the standard stuff but there is a blurry line between smile and The Co-operative Bank that confuses them.

For example, I can pay in a cheque or withdraw funds over the counter in a Coop Bank branch, but if I want to set up a foreign bank transfer I have to use the an online secure message. When I asked why I was told over and over "smile is an online bank". Which I suppose is true, up to a point.

The one almost inexcusable omission from their online banking is any way to download your statements. You have to scrape the data from the pages themselves, and infuriatingly, they display the page of most recent items in a slightly different format to older pages, making it a pain to merge data scraped from different pages.

In lesser annoyances, they make you do a stupid amount of typing to log in, about the only bit of which is actually secure is two randomly selected digits from your 4-digit PIN. All other info is insecure: account number, sort code, first school attended, yada yada yada. All in all they make you enter something like 30 characters spread across 3-5 input boxes and two pages, all for about 6 bits of actual entropy. Unless, of course, you're the sort of person who when asked to tell your bank what your first school was, replies "8EOHzxdO6QnJ".

Could you elaborate? What makes the Co-operative Bank the best choice from an ethical standpoint?

(http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/buyersguides/money/bankingcur...)

> Another mutually-owned business, and a clear best buy in the report is the Co-operative Bank. Since 1993 – and in response to the kind of concerns shown above – it has been developing detailed public position statements on who it will and who it will not lend to. These now cover seven human rights areas, five environmental areas, four international development areas and five animal welfare issues. More details are available at www.co-operative.coop/corporate/ethicsinaction/ethicalpolicies. It also uses your money to campaign on key issues of the moment such as unconventional fossil fuels or the decline of bees. Although other banks have come up with similar policy statements, none come close to the Co-operative’s for clarity and ambition. One of the most frequently asked questions at Ethical Consumer is how the Co-operative can be a best buy when its score is much lower than other providers. Our answer is that its relatively low score is the result of it being part of the Co-operative Group which – as a supermarket – is involved in animal farming and other activities which its banking competitors are not. Best Buys are there for us to apply a sense check to our mechanistic, but largely useful, rankings. In other areas, we weight key categories for the sector when choosing the best buys – such as workers' rights and supply chain management for clothing. In banking, having a clear ethical lending policy is a prime concern, which is why the Co-operative tops the pile.

They're owned by their members (hence the name), and operate pretty much exclusively as an old-school retail bank without any of the other banking activity that tends to at least wander into ethical grey areas.

I used to think that Mutuals would have their members interests first and foremeost. Certainly they never tire of telling people that. But my actual experience is that it's not true. Mutuals, commonly, are like any business where the owner (the membership) isn't paying attention and the result is a business that puts the interests of the staff first. Service to members of a mutual society can be every bit as bad as any public listed company and is often worse because of the lack of a profit incentive means no one gives a damn

That's a bit of a strawman I think — surely by the logic you're using, the existence of a profit motive would mean that the company was interested only in serving its shareholders and would ignore its consumers? There are plenty of examples of this, but it doesn't mean it's true generally of profit-making companies.

apart from the massive loan (£40 million) they have given to the Labour Party.

On the subject of "slightly" shady, let's not forget Barclay's enabling (via a questionable naming rights deal) of neighborhood-killing, taxpayer-fleecing eminent domain abuse, either:

http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2012/06/t-shirt-im-s...

What's the problem with the MTA receiving $200,000 in free money? Nobody even knew what Pacific St. was anyway -- it's a minor one-way street that doesn't even go through at Flatbush. (The station should have been called Atlantic/Flatbush or Atlantic/4th but the MTA doesn't really name stations that way.)

Barclays Center is built above a rail yard, which wasn't really doing much for the neighborhood either. All the hate for Barclays Center is completely misguided and the complaints are just the NIMBY types looking for something to whine about.

So I don't understand how anyone could possibly call redeveloping a rail yard into a stadium "shady". Maybe you don't want the foot traffic in your neighborhood, but it's hard to blame Barclays for that.

Does any country have one of those?

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