AIB online banking - transfer amounts in CENTS!

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ClubMan

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I just went to transfer money from one AIB account to another online and noticed that they insist that you enter the amount to be transferred in cents - e.g. €100 is entered as 10000! Why on earth do they do it that way... :confused:
 
yeah it's very off putting, specially since other banks do it the normal way! I always mistype automatically and then have to use the 'back button'
 
I only noticed it now. Might be the first time I did a transfer - can't remember. Bit scary putting in 1000000 for €10K especially when I'm not a (€) millionaire! :eek:
 
You need to be careful now when you go back to paying bills in normal systems that you don't get mixed up. See here for someone who over paid their eircom bill by entering in the amount in cents instead of Euro. Really there should be 1. Consistency and 2. Checks for mad stuff
 
ClubMan said:
I just went to transfer money from one AIB account to another online and noticed that they insist that you enter the amount to be transferred in cents - e.g. €100 is entered as 10000! Why on earth do they do it that way... :confused:
Click to expand...

Umm... Banking systems (old mainframes / file formats etc) hold 'Money' as integers (less memory over head.... those were the days…). Anyway this what you get when, what I call 'Systems Programmers' develop 'Joe Bloggs' end user applications.

In house ‘Systems Programmer’: If it is hard to use or there is a bug, ‘Sure I can just go down to their office, see the problem and fix it. But I won't be too bothered to fix the origional bug which caused the problem in the first place. It helps to justify my existence.’
Developer of end user ‘Joe Bloggs’ applications: It better be bullet proof and easy/instinctive to use. I don’t want to be wasting my time trying to diagnose a problem over the phone or helping a user who hardly knows how to turn on the PC. A waste of time and money.

Another bug bear of mine is on BOI's site where display of dates and amounts are formatted and justified differently depending on the screen you are on. Otherwise know and sloppy and lazy programming and bad quality control...
 
ClubMan said:
I just went to transfer money from one AIB account to another online and noticed that they insist that you enter the amount to be transferred in cents - e.g. €100 is entered as 10000! Why on earth do they do it that way... :confused:
Click to expand...

There was a thread here recently and the poster had accidentally transferred several thousand euro to ESB or Bord Gais...I bet they were once an AIB customer who cant shake the ridiculous use of cent now!
 
You need to be careful now when you go back to paying bills in normal systems that you don't get mixed up. See here for someone who over paid their eircom bill by entering in the amount in cents instead of Euro. Really there should be 1. Consistency and 2. Checks for mad stuff
Click to expand...
As already mentioned by someone else!
 
The most ridiculous thing is that AIB business banking is in euro (not cents) and the two interfaces aren't hugely different otherwise so for someone like me using both versions on a regular basis it can get confusing and I have to keep double checking everything. It's a pain in the ass.
 
The most annoying thing is that you can't do more than 5000 Euro per day. You can;t change the limit. I tried to understand why and they told me "for security reasons". How stupid is that?
 
I just transferred €10K from one AIB account to another no problem.

Maybe you mean from AIB to another external account? Perhaps it's like PTSB who have a €3K limit on transfers to external accounts if I recall correctly but the limit applies separately to online and telephone banking so you can transfer a total of €6K in two chunks if necessary.
 
I also hit the 500,000 cents withdrawal limit recently on the on-line 7 day notice account.

It let me me give notice of a withdrawal of 1,000,000 cents but then only let me withdraw half of that. I had to give another weeks notice and wait the week to take the other half a million cents out. Very annoying and why is it in cents??? :confused:
 
Surely AIB could fix their middleware i.e. the system that interfaces between online banking and their computer system to allow people to enter decimal points!
How hard would it be?!

I think the entering things in cents came in when AIB launched phone banking, it was difficult to get a decimal point on a telephone as there's no such key. So, they just insisted you dial all the digits in cent.

It's confusing and I'm sure it causes problems.

They really don't have any reason to confinue such things.
 
It's not even the middleware - it's much simpler - just the presentation layer that should normally require minimal change and testing to implement this change - if it's properly architected, however going by my experience of AIB systems, it probably isn't. This layer should convert to the required format when interacting with the next tier in either direction. So no changes required to any other systems, whether mainframe DB, JMS, reporting & correspondence generation, DAOs etc.
 
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