Online Banking – A Rant

Two of my favorite service providers over the last few years have been PNC Bank and Paytrust.  Currently they are not playing nice with each other to the disadvantage of their joint customers.  Moreover, this may be advance warning of a problem in online banking in general.

Paytrust (owned by Intuit of Quicken fame) is a bill payment service which not only allows you to pay ALL your bills online but also serves as the address to which bill are sent.  Even though we’ve moved a couple of times and travel a lot, we don’t have to change the address where our bills go.  Paytrust scans those bills which it doesn’t receive electronically so we can pay online no matter where we are in the world and bills don’t have to chase us from place to place.

PNC Bank has an OK online presence and great human support, at least at the Princeton, NJ branch.  A few people have been involved with handling our accounts there over the last ten years and they’ve been so great that we’ve continued to do most of our banking there even though we now live in Vermont. They even reimburse ATM fees other banks charge here or abroad so it doesn’t matter to us that they have no ATM machines locally.

There are two interfaces between Paytrust and PNC which make this work.  Paytrust writes and mails checks and makes electronic payments on my behalf which PNC processes against my checking account there.  This part continues to work fine. 

The second essential feature is that Paytrust displays what it calls a SmartBalance.  This is the net of the current balance in the funding account and any payments made with Paytrust but not yet cleared.  I almost never write paper checks on this account so this is my current balance.  I don’t have to keep any other check register.  At the end of the year I buy a CD from Paytrust with all my bills and payments on it.  Meanwhile I can generate reports, see what checks have cleared etc.

In order to know which checks have cleared and get the balance, Paytrust has to access my bank account.  Access to the account is now broken through Paytrust.  The effect is no SmartBalance and a system which has become much, much harder to use – almost not worth using.

What happened is this:  PNC like many banks wants to make its website more secure and help protect consumers against phishing; this is a good thing for them to be doing.  Paytrust apparently uses a technique known as “screen scraping” – their computer pretends to be a person while talking to the PNC computer.  But the Paytrust computer can’t read and respond to new patterns the way a human can so. When the format and sequence of login screens changes as it has, the Paytrust computer can’t log on to the PNC computer.  This has happened before for brief periods until the Paytrust computer could be reprogrammed.

However, this outage has stretched on.  Since part of the goal of PNC’s redesign is to thwart attacks by robots, their programmers are trying to defeat screen scrapers.  So I’m not sure that Paytrust will be able to program around this – or that it should.

Quicken Bill Pay Service (also from Intuit) apparently uses a more robust way to download information from banks and is not broken by these changes (I’m not using Quicken Bill Pay but that’s what I’ve been told).  In general, screen scraping is a bad way to do computer to computer communication.  These should be done through APIs or other defined interfaces.  Generally, screen scraping is done when the service whose screens are being scraped hasn’t defined an API or doesn’t want to make the API available to the scraping service.  It is easy to see why Paytrust prior to the acquisition by Intuit started out as a screen scraper where the more powerful Quicken line of products was able to get the attention of banks for their format and even become a standard for financial transactions.

What is very difficult to understand and be patient with is that, even though Intuit acquired Paytrust at the end of 2004 according to PC World, it has either made Paytrust compatible with Quicken (or vice versa) nor fixed Paytrust’s dependence on screen scraping.

Paytrust is an unacknowledged part of the Intuit family.  Every Paytrust page carries an Intuit brand and copyright statement.  The “about” on the Paytrust site goes to a page about Intuit.  But Paytrust appears nowhere in the list of products on the Intuit site.  A search of the Intuit site using the keyword “paytrust” gets no hits.

In the TopTenReviews.com rankings of bill payment services, Paytrust comes in first, Quicken Bill pay is sixth, and PNC’s own bill payment service is rated ninth.  Of the three, only Paytrust can receive and scan paper bills.  Of the three, only Paytrust is broken.  Arghhh…

Oh, yeah, customer service.

When I saw the announcement of the security changes at PNC I got worried and emailed my always responsive contact at PNC.  Expectedly, she was responsive; she checked and found out that the changes might be a problem but couldn’t tell me whether the bank was working with Paytrust in advance.  She thought, as did I, that it would be helpful that Paytrust is owned by Intuit.

I told her I would also give a heads up to Paytrust but things broke before I got around to it.  I immediately filed a ticket – first to complain according to the Paytrust CSR – and got courteous service.  But it’s more than a week now and the problem is not resolved nor is there a resolution date.  Any attempt to update SmartBalance gets an immediate message saying that it is “temporarily” unavailable for this account, try again later (not an accurate status of the problem).

Some Paytrust CSRs (I’ve spoken to several) are frank that there may be a problem ever adapting to this new security system AND that it is happening at more and more banks. 

I asked for a list of banks for which SmartBalance is working (it used to be on the Paytrust site).  Both by phone and email CSRs told me that such a list “could not be made available” but, if I tell them what banks I have available locally, they will tell me which, if any, of them “support” SmartBalance.

I told them that I can bank anywhere in the US; I don’t want to play guessing games; I’d like the list, please.

“We can’t give you the list.”

“You mean you WON’T.”

“We can’t.”

“Why?”

“What if we were to tell you that bank supports SmartBalance and then it breaks?”

“What if I ask you if a bank supports SmartBalance and you say it does and then it breaks?  Your willing to answer that question; why won’t you just give me the list.”

“We can’t.”

Of course there’s no point in harassing CSRs; they’re not responsible for the policy they have to defend. I asked in email for a contact at Paytrust I could discuss this with but was only given the customer support line; I asked for a supervisor to complain to and ended up on infinite hold (should have but didn’t call back).

BTW, parent Intuit WILL give out a list of the banks which support downloads and uploads from Quicken Bill Pay.

A real danger is that innovation in online banking – which doesn’t usually come from banks – will be squeezed out in the name of security. It doesn’t have to be that way.  We can have both security and third-party bill paying services. But all parties have to play nicely with others.