BNZ – it gets worse for all of us

My own personal BNZ Sucks saga continues, but there is worse news, via a response to my internal emails:

From April 2008, all Internet Banking customers will be required to use NetGuard when logging into Internet Banking.

I applied for my damnable Netguard card on the 21st of October (which I blogged about in passing), but when I was at home over the last few days there was…. ….no card.

So I applied again. and again. and again. Sure enough – there is no mechanism in the Netguard application application that recognises that you already have an application. (That sentence does actually make sense.)
But when I went to log in just now, I got this:

Once I bypassed (I get 3 weeks) the useless login ritual, I found that an internal email I sent was successful in ordering a Netguard card.

I do not envy the poor (but lovely) folk that work at BNZ and have to deal with these systems.

Along with the April 2008 information, there were a few more snippets in the previous internal email.

Responding to my concerns about the ease of committing fraud by fax:

When we were reviewing what we would accept as an additional level of security, we decided against accepting scanned documents as confirmation due to the potential for fraud, given that documents in an electronic format are much easier to manipulate.

1: Actually it is probably just vestiges of old practice and law, and

2: it is oh so much easier to create a fake black and white low-res fax than a fake high res picture

In response to my concerns about my inability to use online banking if my Netguard card was in my stolen wallet:

The NetGuard card works in conjunction with your access number and password. If your wallet was stolen, the other person would be unable to use the NetGuard card to login to Internet Banking, as they would not have access to your password details.

That doesn’t help me – I still cannot login, and nothing has changed viz a vis my security versus before the card was required.

And on why Netguard is becoming mandatory:

NetGuard has been chosen as the best way for the majority of our customers to utilise the same security procedure, rather than trying to tailor the procedure to a customer’s specific computer settings or ability to access a fax machine.

All, not majority. You mean all customers from April 2008 right? Even those with OSX, and even those with remarkable propensity to lose any loose piece of paper?

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile Nielsen Consumer Finance Monitor seems to indicate that ASB and Kiwibank are the best in NZ:

74 per cent of their customers rated them as either excellent or very good.

ASB is looking better every day.