Do you think First Direct will reopen to new customers in 2020?

gsmh

Highland76 said:

OP, why not create a new poll asking folks to guess this week's lottery numbers?

What's the matter with you? The OP is perfectly entitled to post, you can move on and ignore it. Why jump in and criticise like this? Why would anyone do that? I have a look at what is posted on this forum daily, only a few posts catch my interest and I read them. I don't feel the need to post in the other threads telling the OP how inane they are. It's emotional immaturity, TBH.

happy_hazelnuts

ollie the octopus says ..... oh forget it

blue.peter

Grumpy_chap said:

It is odd, because FD started out as an alternative, modern way of doing banking with no branches being the future but they have just got stuck at that point and not continued to stay at the top of the game.

Yes, quite. They started as a telephone bank, and just haven't really moved on from that.

First Direct was slow to introduce Internet banking and, when it did, it required their own software. It was several years before it became possible to acess their systems through an ordinary web browser. They're also pretty awful when it comes to easy-acccess savings rates. On the upside, their Offset Mortgage was a great product for me.

I stuck with them for 25 years before giving up. Once the mortgage was paid off, there just wasn't any reason to stay with them.

I still haven't found another bank that's a patch on First Direct for phone service. However, that ceased to be my primary method of account management many years ago. Other banks have better online service (notably, of those that I've tried, Santander and Nationwide), but fail on phone service (RBS is my bête noir here).

I did like First Direct's Internet Banking Plus, which was a great aggregation tool. But it relied on screen scraping, was never developed, and gradually became less useful as a result. They withdrew it last year. I'd really like to see something like that again. Open Banking has the potential, but doesn't (yet) include anything like all of the relevant institutions. If that's to be useful, it doesn't just need to involve all of the clearing banks, but also credit card issuers, ISA providers (including S&S ones), smaller savings banks, mortgage lenders and so on.

happy_hazelnuts

One of the reasons I stick with first direct is their security - for example voice id, the fact that you cannot run the app on more than one phone at the time, secure key  etc etc

to me that is worth a lot but obviously others will disagree

blue.peter

happy_hazelnuts said:

One of the reasons I stick with first direct is their security - for example voice id, the fact that you cannot run the app on more than one phone at the time, secure key  etc etc

Voice ID? Have they actually got that to work properly?

My former employer's IT department used it. I can best describe it as an unmitigated disaster. It never accepted that anyone was who they actually were. I'm convinced that the IT department only installed it so that they never had to deal with users.

happy_hazelnuts

yes they have ...

DCFC79

Highland76 said:

OP, why not create a new poll asking folks to guess this week's lottery numbers?
Cheers

Now thats a poll we need.

DCFC79

As there is no option for my view Ill have to post it
How on earth are we meant to know.

randompenitent

I assume they closed to new customers because they depend on large call centres. Most of the staff have been sent home, so the capacity of those call centres is way down on normal. So opening up for new customers will happen if either they get their call centre staff back into the call centres, or they find some way of allowing them to work from home.  The former needs the virus to be under better control, the latter some serious thinking about security, and the provision of secured network access for all the customer facing staff. 

Not an answer to the OP, I’m afraid, but I suspect those are the constraints FD are operating under.

Grumpy_chap

randompenitent said:

I assume they closed to new customers because they depend on large call centres. Most of the staff have been sent home, so the capacity of those call centres is way down on normal. So opening up for new customers will happen if either they get their call centre staff back into the call centres, or they find some way of allowing them to work from home.  The former needs the virus to be under better control, the latter some serious thinking about security, and the provision of secured network access for all the customer facing staff. 

Not an answer to the OP, I’m afraid, but I suspect those are the constraints FD are operating under.

Except, I bank with FD and right at the start of coronavirus, before lockdown, I asked about the call centre viability if there was a lockdown and people could not attend the call centre.  I was assured that it was not an issue because the person I was speaking with assured me that she was working from home anyway and the majority of their call handlers now work from home and very few are actually in a call centre.  So, either that was a very quick and convincing bit of acting, or the truth.  Whatever, i never noticed any long wait times to speak with them all through the whole lockdown.