Both my personal and business credit cards are with AIB.
From time to time credit card services need to contact me. Unfortunately a lot of the calls I get from them and other parts of the bank come from a blocked number ie. I cannot see who is calling me when I answer the call on my mobile.
I really don’t like answering calls from blocked numbers ..
So I raised the issue with AIB and since I’ve learnt that simply submitting feedback is pointless I lodged an actual complaint.
Here’s their response:
So they’re basically saying that they since their fraud team only answer the phone during office hours they can’t let us know what number they’re calling from.
Sorry, what?
Irish banks ..
That’s truly only the half of it!
I have my standard VISA Debit card and VISA credit Card from AIB. I also have other accounts but now to lodge to those, I have to have more plastic cards – 1 for each account. Its just a big corporation of fail!
I’m not even going to get started on friends who’ve tied to get business expansion loans…
I’m more and more dissatisfied with AIB.
For business banking (IBB) they:
– don’t let you download CSV for credit cards from IBB. Basically the only way to enter CreditCard transitions to accounting system is manual
– they don’t support and don’t plan to support Yodlee feeds (allow to receive your transactions for trusted application automatically). They have it for personal banking which is useless (I don’t think that many people use accounting software for personal finance).
This practice is so dumb. Worse, I find I get calls from a bank (not just AIB I may add, UBL and BOI all suffer from this) from a withheld number. They open with the conversation telling me that they will be recording the conversation, and then ask me security questions. I explain, I have no way of knowing who they are so refuse to answer. They ask me to call them back. They give me the number.
In one case, the number that was given to me was not listed on their website, so, in theory I still shouldn’t trust it. So I rang my branch. They weren’t aware of the number. They gave me an alternative call center number; The alternative call center number were able to verify the number I was given, but they were the only one to do so.
Ridiculous carry on.
Alexey
I was wondering about the feeds thing. I didn’t know they had it available for personal banking, but as you say, it’s not as useful. But if you have any information on how it works even for personal cards I’d appreciate it. There’s a few tools that I use that support US banks and credit cards, but I haven’t been able to find any that work with Irish banks
Thanks for your comment
Michele
Dermot
Yeah – the “security” questions from a number you can’t identify aren’t helpful at all.
My most recent experience was with another financial institution leaving me a voicemail about an “issue”. So I rang their customer service centre who weren’t able to see any issue on my account.
It was only by chance that I got put through to a more experienced staff member a day or so later who was able to see the “issue” and help me resolve it.
And of course the number they gave me to call wasn’t published anywhere, so I was unable to verify it
Thanks for your comment
Michele
Michele,
sure, you can check http://www.yodlee.com
From what I know Ulster supports both Personal and Business banking. AIB supports it for personal banking only. I don’t have personal CreditCard, so I can’t tell you if it works with credit cards. But I can confirm that it works with personal current account in AIB. I was able to import all my transaction to Xero – accounting system I’m using.
http://help.xero.com/Help/Payments_YodleeFeeds.htm
Yodlee have feed APIs and as far as I understand few hundreds services use it already.
Alexy/Michele:
I think anyone who uses a service like Yodlee is asking for trouble. As best I can make out, in order to use them, you have to share your banking credentials with them. See http://help.xero.com/Help/Payments_YodleeFeeds.htm#BK_How
which states “Yodlee accesses your online banking and securely stores your bank’s login credentials
To be able to access your online banking site, Yodlee needs to store a copy of your online banking login credentials (i.e. your user name and password). You’ll provide these credentials when you’re in Xero setting up a Yodlee feed. Yodlee then logs into your banking website on your behalf and retrieves your account statement data.”
On one hand we can’t complain about our bank’s lack of understanding of secure practices, then in another hand the keys to the kingdom to a third party.
Don’t you think?
Dermot
Ugh! That’s not good at all
I haven’t had a chance to explore Yodlee so thanks for pointing that out.
Some of the online accounting and expenses systems hook into non-Irish banks, so I was thinking more about that then anything else. For example Expensify can pull in data from Amex and others, though it won’t work with my Irish card – or didn’t the last time I checked
Michele
I’ve complained about the same. Same experience as Dermot – someone calls from a blocked number and then asks you to verify your information in order to proceed. Info that would be required to commit fraud. Its like they are setting themselves us to keep their jobs by enabling more fraud.
Alexey – quick hack on the cc downloads, copy and paste the credit card details from IBB using firefox into excel. Firefox has a different block layout so it works. My accountants nearly cried when they saw me do it, having spent hundreds of hours manually typing them in for clients over the years.
Em, why can’t the number have an auto-responder which gives a message outside of business hours? Possibly with an email address or maybe even a fax number?