This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world, counting the British Royal Family among their notable clients, and they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date. Pretty much sums up what rich people think about technology: make it sexy and powerful but I don't want to hear about ongoing maintenance costs. According to Wikipedia, new clients needed £500k in disposable funds to set up an account back in 2001.[0]
I'd definitely have gone to banks are terrible at IT rather than rich people.
I am not a rich person, although I'm comfortable, but several of my banks are terrible at IT. Like "We are upgrading our web site so it won't be available until Tuesday" level bad at IT.
Note that wasn't just "Some services won't be available", the whole web site was out of action for most of a day. It's disappointing but understandable if I can't send a random stranger 2500 ¥ at 2am because the bank are upgrading something. But it's straight up crazy that I can't even see my 2018 bank statement PDF because they're upgrading, it's the sort of feature a PHP Blog site can make work.
Never had any problem like this. I’ve essentially been doing all my banking online for as long as I’ve had any banking to do. So 20+ years or so. Can’t really remember any significant downtime or problems. Biggest problem I’ve had with a bank tech-wise is that my current bank refuses to support Apple Pay. Considering switching banks because of this.
I've never had this problem with my good bank (First Direct) but I had this problem with a bank I use for some routine financial transactions (Santander, currently advertised by celebrities Ant & Dec for some reason) and also with my safe bank (NS&I, a bank owned by my country and thus "safe" in the sense that if it's bankrupt so is my country and therefore that's the least of my problems)
Maybe every other bank is better? I doubt it. For me one bank being unavailable is a mild inconvenience (it so happened I wanted to use Santander to check some records, but most days I wouldn't have noticed) but most people only have one bank, so it being out of action is really problematic, and we live in an era when "you could visit a physical branch" might as well be "You could fly to the moon" for all the practical good it does normal customers.
We could say not just banks for rich people but most companies where software is not a product (money-generating part) are bad at IT (general trend: cost-centers are neglected).
In a previous life I banked with Coutts. They were very pro online banking and security very early on. From the mid nineties to early noughties I was handling my account online and was given a physical securid token (Remember them? Like a thick credit card with an LCD display that generated a new OTP every 60 seconds) to deal with the login. But then they were absorbed into NatWest, and I expect their approach to IT changed.
> they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date
Guessing their clients aren’t banking via mobile apps, their staff having lines to their banker. Most top-tier private banks barely have an online presence. If you want something, you (or your assistant) calls or texts your banker.
Coutts has (in)famously gone through a digital transformation recently making talking to a personal banker exceedingly difficult. They are getting slaughtered on social media and on review sites for the change, because the new website and app are extraordinarily bad, even for a bank.
I seriously don't understand how websites with TREMENDOUS funding end up so bad. I have literally watched seniors in college, who three years prior did not know how to "int i = 1;", do senior design projects that put out what I'd call "standard bootstrap + rails websites" (which are fine! just specifying how EASY it is nowadays to make websites that don't suck) which are ridiculously superior to even any single page on most bank's websites.
Look, I'm a data engineer by day, I understand how bad UIs happen. I use Airflow, for God's sake, and heavily customized Airflow at that (where we've honestly only kind of roughly kept pace with the UI quality. like I said, I get how bad UIs happen).
But seriously. I try to be charitable. I can understand how page flows might be janky, how you might need a few redirects as they pass you through decades of legacy systems, etc.
But by God, there are some pages where I seriously cannot figure how they made that specific page, alone, in isolation so bad. The only thing I can come up with is they either a) contracted it out to someone who is literally not as capable as someone 2 years into a CS degree, or they've split the page among multiple teams who all wrote little scraps of HTML and JS and then some poor soul had to weld them all together and that's how it ended up.
Is it really just that they all hire huge incompetent contractors who "nobody ever got fired for hiring etc etc" and then they invariably fuck it up? I don't get how that doesn't get disrupted by either SaaS or just someone making a contracting shop that actually finishes projects correctly.
> senior design projects that put out what I'd call "standard bootstrap + rails websites" ... which are ridiculously superior to even any single page on most bank's websites.
Oh sweet summer child. You have not known the sharp pain of regulatory constraints, split stakeholder constraints, legacy enterprise constraints, COVID constraints. You know not of capacity planning, SOC2, or international banking law.
You have not known the one million lines of code repositories (PLURAL).
You do not see behind the summer rain. To the endless blizzard of business logic behind the frontend. To the third party vendors, evil so vast if it were written down the generations beyond could never forgive.
I've been in the industry nearly a decade and have indeed seen github enterprise repositories so large that github tells us we need to either split into smaller monorepos or stop using github enterprise and roll our own e.g. like google etc do.
I've exclusively worked in highly regulated industries - first a registered broker dealer where one of my (less favored) hats I wore was working directly with the SEC and FINRA handling inquiries, and the second being a large fintech company I don't want to be too specific about that dealt with a lot of banking and money movement regulations.
I'd appreciate it if you'd point your condescending prose elsewhere. I stand by my point. There's no reason some of the banking sites I've had to use should be so bad given their funding. If an ungraduated CS student can make their website not break chrome's credit card autocompletion, why can't enormous banks?
... who then hires the cheapest contractors they can find to do the work. The developers working on the $million sites may very well have far less app development experience than a 2nd year CS student. The CS student is also motivated to make a reasonable effort for good marks; the contractors know they will get paid, regardless of what crap they deliver.
In my former company we had a small software project to write a small driver for remote command execution on an embedded processor. Dealt with many senior managers on the internally outsourced SW side, and after months what we got was terrible. Buggy, inflexible, etc. It eventually came to a head and we had a meeting where the guy actually doing the work was called in. He was fresh out of college, and way over his head. Layers of management meetings, deadlines, pressure, testing by the HW teams, bug reports, etc. Never once did that team get more senior devs in to re architecht (or even architecht in the first place). In the end we dropped what they had and rewrote it in a few days, and we're HW guys.
Definitely true. I'm with a bank that feels like I might be their poorest client. They do have a nice app, but the real benefit to working with them is that I have a banker on standby that I can call or email for anything.
Wonder why a transaction was denied? Shoot an email with a screenshot. Want 500$ of Moroccan Dirhams for your next trip? Shoot a text and they'll put together a package + a few sweets for you to pick up when you stop by.
> Try to bank in Switzerland, it is so 1980ties...
What do you mean by that? In a way it's not retro enough (for me?), I currently have an account that can only be accessed via a mobile app (e.g. no website). See for instance https://www.neon-free.ch/en/
You can open an account fully online from your home, I don't think you even have to mail anything.
Fully agree with both you and parent. I'm in the process of switch from Credit Suisse to Neon.
Opening an account with Neon is the simplest thing ever.
I'm still on the phone weekly with CS to even attempt to make them do anything I've ordered them to.
Three weeks ago, they sent me a letter to confirm that my email address was authorized to make orders. I sent that back with the enclosed envelope. 4 days later, they called me to confirm my order. I did (verbally). They called back 10min later to confirm again. I confirmed again.
It has been two weeks since that phone call and the transfer has still not been completed.
There is quite a gap between the incumbents and “neo banks” in CH.
Neo banks are more modern and convenient but only compared to traditional banks within CH: spotty online bills support, no twint (or prepay twint), money transfers only occur once a day at 10am on banking days, customer service open from 9 to 5… Banks in CH are hilariously bad (and expensive), and it’s a shock because you always have this image that Switzerland banks must be amazing. Nope, far from it.
I feel like if I need customer service for basic banking services (as these banks are supposed to provide), I'm already at the wrong place.
For the rest I guess it's things I don't personally care about, so while it could be better (I have a EUR account for which my recipients get transfers within hours), I don't really notice it in practice.
I think it's becoming increasingly popular to only develop mobile apps: they are basically required at this point so no way to avoid the corresponding costs, while companies might save money on other entry points (physical, websites). Ideally you'll get some of these savings back via lower fees, but it definitely makes the loss or theft of a phone way more of a problem than it used to be.
The wealth management arm of a bank can simultaneously have managers with clients and sane online systems. Some people will want to do everything over the phone and/or in-person. Others will still want the personal touch while also wanting all the usual online access--possibly including mobile (though this tends to be less relevant with wealth management accounts).
I suspect their customers are people who want personalised and personal service, and sound financial advice and investment opportunities.
If they wanted an app-based fintech they could have instantly opened an account with the many available companies in the field, and maybe they also have, but obviously that is not what Coutts is about.
> This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world
Not particularly exclusive, bought by NatWest in 2000 and then taken over by Ernst & Cie. So its little more than a brand-name these days, you can effectively buy your way in.
If you want truly exclusive, you have to cross the road and walk a bit further down the Strand to Fleet Street.
Regarding Private Banks and the online world, yes they tend to be a bit further behind the bleeding edge. But then if one can call up one's relationship manager who recognises one by voice without the need for tiresome security questions, then one might understand why expenditure on one's bank's online services is a secondary priority.
> So if you can’t “buy your way in” to these banks, what are the criteria?
First you will need to be "introduced" to the bank by an existing customer. We're not talking about a referral link here, we're saying who introduces you is just as important as who is being introduced (i.e. long-standing customer vouching for an introduction gets more weight than a newbie trying to get a mate in).
Second, if the introduction is acceptable, then you will be invited to a meeting with one or more members of the bank's senior management to determine if you are a good fit (and no, "good fit" does not equal a commercial fit about determining how much they can sell you, its a "good fit" as in determining that you have your head screwed on and won't cause the bank problems).
You might think this is excessive, but at the most exclusive bank the management have genuine skin in the game (e.g. bank is purposely setup as unlimited liability legal structure, so if management were to ever fuck up, they really would FUCK UP because they have no corporate veil to hide behind).
It also means that dodgy overseas money and the nouveau riche can't buy their way in and start causing problems. A truly exclusive bank values quality of client over quantity of clients.
To show the customer they're putting their money where their mouth is, i.e. that they are genuinely more interested in the long-term relationship than the pure commercial profitability of the client.
Going for unlimited liability also focuses the mind of the bank's management. You can't make short-sighted decisions just because you want to boost your bonus. You have to genuinely make sound decisions with the bank and the bank's customer's in mind.
Its very rare these days. Rarer than pure partnership legal structure which is already very rare. Almost all organisations these days opt to take the easier route and hide behind the corporate veil.
I've always wanted to get an account with them because of a throwaway line in a Patrick O'brien book:
> 'Mr Babbington,' he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?' Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact, a valid accusation. He reddened, and said, 'I don't know, sir.' 'Think, sir, think,' said Jack, his good-tempered face clouding unexpectedly...'Never mind. Write a handsome letter. Two pages at least. And send it in to me with your daily workings tomorrow. Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares.' For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters' parental allowance for them. 'Hoares,' he repeated absently once or twice, 'my bankers are Hoares,' and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success.
One take I've heard on that, whether or not its true I don't know, is that it is a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of the very early generation of Hoares, one of whom earnt himself the nickname "naughty" (Richard "Naughty" Hoare).
Allegedly he was no stranger to, shall we say, a particularly extravagant lifestyle.
My bank, too, has been struggling with app updates to the point that sometimes I can’t accomplish a simple task like checking my credit card transactions. It’s so infuriating that companies in particular (let’s say critical) domains are allowed to reach rock bottom levels of app quality. As a consumer, this is a horrible position to be in - changing banks is not straightforward, and the alternatives are not much better.
All the staff you interact with have been to the same handful of British public schools (ie private fee schools) so you never have to talk to someone who is ignorant of precisely your standing in the British class system and they will all speak with comforting RP, follow the cricket, and drop an occasional Latin phrase into the conversation. Banking service is basically as shite as all the rest. [source: I ran a company that for very strange reasons ended up having to use them for business banking services]
> What unique services does a bank like this offer it’s clients?
No clue about Coutt’s. But for a top-tier private bank, you have someone you can contact 24/7 (if not them personally, someone you know on their team) to help you. You can effortlessly escalate to the bank’s senior leadership when problems arise.
As a result, having cash overnighted in the event of a lost wallet, cabs paid for over the phone on the firm’s account, or international wires processed instantly and without fees happen. (Also, Formula 1 tickets and access to the firm’s Parterre box at the Met, as well as, for the up and coming, introductions to the bank’s other clients.)
Well, not on the same level, but my dad used to have an account with a small bank in our town, and as a business owner he could literally walk in and speak to the owner of the bank within 10 minutes tops. Any issues with his accounts or international payments, there was an employee(usually the same one) looking into it personally.
It was just a lot more personal service than any large bank could ever offer.
I imagine this is exactly the same, just on a bigger scale.
Growing up, a friend's dad ran a couple of fast food franchises. As teenagers, we talked a lot to the dad about his business, and he was more than happy to impart his business wisdom on youngsters. Anyway, he told us he banked with the local bank in town rather than any of the regional or national banks for just that reason. He could walk in and talk to the top guy whenever he wanted. The top guy understood his financial situation completely, and would easily make arrangements the big banks would take weeks to make, if ever.
My brother did the same thing when he started his businesses, and I've moved to it over time. It's hard to beat talking to a banker who understands what you're doing and is actually there to help you.
First thing that comes to mind is that a bank like this is probably going to have a much better developed wealth management offering than mainstream commercial banks. The sort that helps you diversify into art rather than real estate, sort of thing.
You pay for service, for, service, flexibility, and and advice.
Service= a dedicated banker with whom you can call directly with issues/problems
Flexibility= Custom solutions / humans in the loop decisions. E.g. I know someone who was able to procure a 90 day bridge loan implying dizzying leverage as he was buying a business and buying + selling a primary residence because he was able to sit down with someone, walk through the merits with a human underwriter.
Advice= Conduit of multitudes of expert opinions around insurance, tax, estate planning etc.
A relationship with a banker that will cater to your needs at your request. They also know who you are and are prepared to help you with loans based on your relationship more than just a plain algorithm.
The whole of British society is structured this way. Constantly blaming poor people when a good proportion of rich people are rent seeking and/or not doing the most basic things to help their customers.
How is this bank blaming poor people by asking its rich customers not to upgrade to iOS 16? I'm struggling to understand where the logical jump is to, "The whole of British society is structured this way." Which way? I'm assuming you're replying specifically to the parent comments' "what rich people think about technology: make it sexy and powerful but I don't want to hear about ongoing maintenance costs," but not sure how this then implies poor people are being blamed.
Just seems like a flamewar comment that doesn't actually explain itself. If the whole rich vs. poor thing resonates with me on some deep ideological level, I can go ahead and pretend I understand what this all means. Maybe I can even respond with a supportive comment about something something Reagan Republicans.
Most of it is administered by the government and the government manages the profits. It is ultimately His Majesty's government.
The royal family gets some of it in their personal coffers, and it's a nontrivial sum, but it wouldn't fix the UK's financial problems all in one swoop to take it. And it would come at a cost of a significant amount of prestige and tourism dollars. It might be a net gain, but most people in the UK feel that it wouldn't be worth the cost to their nation identity.
Many in the UK want the opposite of nationalization. They want to sell off major government properties to private owners, and let capitalism do the work. This isn't quite a majority opinion but it has strong support (and bitter opposition).
I watched a documentary that featured a hereditary lord who rented out his lands to hunting, events, tenents and takes about how his family had done this for hundreds of years.
I think it’s not just the literal king, but also all the other remaining royalty.
Perhaps privatization is a better path than nationalization. It just seems quite unjust to have literal hereditary land that cannot be transferred.
Funny, that's what all the Republicans kept saying about the Democratic politicians like Newsom who were seen flouting their own COVID lockdown policies.
Maybe it's more than just one tiny group of people who are prone to such things as hypocrisy.
I remember the "Everyone uses Chrome or Firefox, but we need to still support Internet Explorer" days. Because so much software was IE-only, and IE 6 at that, companies had a hard time updating.
I'm sure the consultants they pay to maintain the app cost more to churn out just one version than the entire budget of most mobile app startup companies for the first three years.
I know the team that made this app. It's low price labor who cobble together Java... It will be just as terrible an experience to use as any other 'old tech' banking app.
Not at 500k. Exclusive private offices start making financial sense in the 160M to 200M range. There are shared private offices below that, but this* gets nebulous with asset management and such.
Edit: thst -> this. Mobile autocorrects the wrong "correction"
as someone posted, 500K was like 20 years ago.. it is now a million dollars.
and no one said they have 'exclusive accountants'. There are accounting services where you pay them for a few days work and they take care of all your bills for you.
I've only met one multi-billionaire in my life and can assure you that he has never seen his bills, let alone pay them.
He doesnt even own a smart phone, because he has assistants who handle most of that for him allowing him to focus on one thing - making money.
Family offices are an investment fund + services company wholly owned by a single person/family for the benefit of that person/family's goals. It's much more than accounting services. It's a step above private bank / wealth and assess management by a firm with multiple clients.
Their quality and approaches are highly varied, but the one billionaire you know probably uses one, as the "never pay bills and no smart phone" is fairly indicative of a family office behind the scenes.
It sounds sad to me. It’s like how visions of heaven 500 years ago all imagined huge feasts every day, but if you told me heaven was a Golden Corral, I’d look for a different heaven. We are still in this scarcity-capitalist-mindset that more money/stuff is always better, but I don’t think that’s the right way to be looking at things. We should appreciate the forced scarcity, like how our ancestors may have been hungry sometimes but lived at a much healthier weight.
Please keep in mind I’m not talking about living in poverty, I’m talking about having all your monetary needs met to live your lifestyle (without being forced to work), without having a huge excess left over.
> Please keep in mind I’m not talking about living in poverty, I’m talking about having all your monetary needs met to live your lifestyle (without being forced to work), without having a huge excess left over.
Out of curiosity (not debating, but rather conversating) -- what portion of humanity is in this enviable condition?
I'm not even sure what the measurement would be. It's like asking what portion of humanity didn't suffer any food insecurity back in the 1500s. It's gonna depend on a lot of variables.
It's probably somewhere <5%, maybe <1%, right now (I would include current successful retirees).
I know many rich people maybe one qualifies as ultra rich ($100M+, private jet with crew). Some have assistants but they all access their own banking. They move money around, check balances, dispute fraudulent charges etc.
But all the rich people I know are in tech or banking/investing, and made, not inherited, their money.
As an aside, my guess is that average tax rate for the techies is 40% but probably <30% for the bankers.
Interesting how you don’t frame it as “Apple can’t be bothered to maintain APIs and avoidably forces everyone to rewrite everything to save them the effort”.
A friend is a Director at Apple and banks with Coutts. Just because your bank is shitty in some ways doesn’t mean you don’t care about technology.
My bank (First Republic) caters to richer people, and has had shitty website features in the past. It’s all outsourced to Intuit, I think. But overall it’s a great bank. I care a lot about technology but don’t make all life decisions based on it. One I did make is refuse to buy a car in 2017 (Mini Cooper) that didn’t have CarPlay (I bought a GTI instead).
To clarify, I wasn't trying to say that individuals who bank with Coutts don't care about technology. The point I'm trying to make is that this is a clear example of an institution that has the means to afford a mobile app and they just choose not to perform basic maintenance, which is one of the biggest and most frequent complaints that I see around the industry.
People love to be marketed to and sold the promises of amazing technology that can do extraordinary things, but nobody wants to pay for it. And if you're a company that wants a mobile app as part of your business, then you need to understand that you gotta pay to maintain it. There's no excuse for a bank like this to skip out on app maintenance. If the wealthiest among us can't understand this, what does it say about our decision to transition towards a more technology-reliant society?
> they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date.
In the face of Apple's app store bullshit, I completely understand. Apple regularly shit the bed in getting apps updated. Frankly the wheels have come off their 'premium' branding a while back.
Apple is “premium” in the category of “people who work for a living”, which is not necessarily the same as premium in the category “the face of one of our customers is printed on everyone else’s money”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coutts