Business online banking with Irish banks

Trojan

I've had the dubious pleasure of using BOI's Business On Line service for my Ltd company accounts recently. In fairness to them, it is quite a powerful system - overkill for my needs but good for a larger business I'd guess. But on the flip side, it's absolutely horrendous from a design and usability point of view, and is probably the most frustrating online app I've used, ever. To the point that I'm probably going to change banks because of it.

Have any of you used the other banks business online offerings? Who has the best in terms of usability? Particularly love to hear from anyone who has used both BOI and another provider for comparison.

neris

we use bol aswell and its a pain in the ass. for some reason our account just shut down a few weeks back and we couldn access it. rang them up gave them details and passwords but because theres 2 names on the account the other person also has to ring them but their away so cant get account reactivated. Also find the controls within the account very restrictive. trying to set up payees and standing orders is a nightmare. I used ulster bank about 4 years ago and found their site ok but about a day behind on transactions. It may be better now

ir555

not familiar with BOI but using AIB IBB for the past two years...

a few things that could be improved (such as emailing a supplier when a payment is made - especailly an internaitonal one which takes a few days to clear) but overall I find it very useful.

have tried to help the partner use her personal BOI online account - its a pile of rubbish... after two attempts we moved her account also to AIB..

give AIB a shout and tell them your story - they have people in each area who they will send out to you to help you setup/ train in IBB..

if you have any particular q's on IBB - shout and if I can I will answer.. Why not put a list of the things that BOI was failing on...

best of luck!
D

MyPerfectCousin

The problem with BOI IBB is that it seems to have been designed for use by the accounts department of a multinational corporation, rather than a humble small business. As the OP said, the majority of features are never going to be needed by the small business with one or two accounts and one or two authorised users. Meanwhile, the basic features are kind of lost and overly complicated in this context.

I have used AIB's personal IB for years and find it fairly clean and simple, and nevertheless fairly powerful. MUCH prefer that interface to the BOI IBB one.

Trojan

MyPerfectCousin wrote: »

The problem with BOI IBB is that it seems to have been designed for use by the accounts department of a multinational corporation, rather than a humble small business. As the OP said, the majority of features are never going to be needed by the small business with one or two accounts and one or two authorised users. Meanwhile, the basic features are kind of lost and overly complicated in this context.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Overkill in terms of features I don't have a problem with, as long as the system is usable for the smaller set that I need. Unfortunately it's a design nightmare, and the work flow to accomplish common, simple tasks is long and tortuous. Not good enough.

Trojan

Just to add to my whinge

If you want to make an online transfer, you need to setup your user and authorise them for payments. To do that you create a digital certificate. But wait, there's more... (that should be the BOL tagline)

BOI need to call you on the phone to activate the digital certificate first. And they only do this during office hours. And when they ring you, they do so from a private number, so if you miss the call, well tough luck. And then when you call their BOL support number, after waiting the obligatory 15 minutes on hold, they can't actually handle this request, they need to email the digital cert department to call you back instead - no transfer possible. In fairness, they were quick - they got back to me within 10 minutes after I called support. I only needed to wait another 7 minutes before the cert was ready.

(Aside: don't call their "Lo call" 1890 from your mobile, it'll cost you a fortune, use the international customers +353 1 number instead.)