15 May 2007 - 10:25Usability: Bank of America’s Online Account Access

I have a Visa credit card through Bank of America. A few months ago I noticed a recurring charge on my account which I couldn’t track to anything I was receiving or had agreed to pay for. I followed the normal procedure for challenging a charge and everything seems to have been dealt with. However, it did teach me an important lesson about monitoring charges closely. It is good to discover any fraudulent charges as soon as they occur. Because of this and other reasons, I use the Bank of America Online Account website to regularly check charges, pending charges, etc. I also pay my bills via the online website, choosing not to receive paper statements at all.

Bank of America started a promotion where their credit card customers could open a checking account and receive a $100 bonus from them. I decided to do this, and followed the procedure for opening the account online on Sunday night. Early Monday morning I received an email from Bank of America saying that my account application had been granted. Obviously they send things like the ATM/Debit card and PIN number through conventional mail, and of course I have yet to receive this information - it has been less than 18 hours since I applied for the account.

This morning I tried to access my Bank of America Online Account site to do my normal periodic check of any pending charges. But after entering my login information, I get a new page saying “Other Bank of America Accounts Detected: Enter ATM PIN.” This page required me to enter information about my new account - which I have not yet received - to continue and access information about my existing accounts. The bottom of the page gives my two choices: Continue (which doesn’t work because I can’t enter account information BoA hasn’t given me yet) or Cancel. If I click cancel, I get a page saying “You have decided not to continue which means you will be unable to access your accounts.” Which means I can’t access my existing account either, the one I have had access to for over a year now. The page also gives me a nice set of reasons I can give for why I decided to cancel, including “I don’t have all of the required information” and “I don’t have my ATM PIN.” Except no matter which you choose, it simply cancels the online account login and dumps me back at the Bank of America homepage.

Dear Bank of America: This behavior is broken. Clearly it takes longer for you to actually mail out the new account information than to send out an email saying “your account has been granted.” And clearly it also takes some amount of time for the US Postal Service to actually deliver that mail to me. Fortunately I have already payed my bill for this month, but what if I hadn’t? My experience has been that it can take up to a week or more for new account information to arrive in the mail. Because I choose to receive statements online (which, I might add, saves BoA costs), I don’t have a paper bill stub to send in a check with. So quite conceivably this bug could cause someone to miss a payment, causing the typical enormous late fees and sky high default APR.

I don’t understand how online banking sites get away with this shit. There is absolutely no reason why it should be necessary to completely block access to a customer’s online account access when they sign up for a new account. It doesn’t make sense from a technical standpoint, a security standpoint, or a usability standpoint. All you need to do to implement new account setup in the online account manager is to have a link on the main page of the online account site, after you log in. You can simply say “We show that you recently signed up for a new account. When you receive your account details, click here to add it to online banking.” This works far better from a usability standpoint, and it doesn’t lock a customer out of their own account management tools while waiting for BoA and the USPS. What if the postal service messed up and the new account mailing got lost? I’d be completely screwed, because it would inevitably be a very long time before I had access to my statements and bill pay tools.

I sent a comment in via their online account comment/bug report form. We’ll see what comes of it.