A New Trend in Bank Communications

Until recently, and by recently I mean last week, communicating with a negotiator in the loss mitigation department at a given bank involved sending e-mail back and forth the old fashioned way.  It worked.  I create a new message, I send,  they reply, they send.  Pretty simple if you ask me.

On my end of the equation, however, I implemented a support ticket system which automatically tags the message thread with a tracking number.  Every time someone responds to the original message, which is tied to a specific e-mail address, a database of messages is built which gives me the freedom to delete new mail after I’ve read it instead of letting it stack up in my inbox.

The bank, mechanically, has no idea this is happening and it works out just fine.

Enter bank secure e-mail, a new niusance designed to do nothing more than eat up my time.  Last week I received communications from a negotiator who previously used standard e-mail to communicate.  Now they have implemented a system by which the negotiator posts their message to their secure e-mail system, and then their system notifies me that there’s a message.  Then, I have to register to use their system (only once) and then login to their website to read and reply to their messages.

The disadvantages are many, but the most obvious is that I no longer receive the actual message in my e-mail inbox.  My ticketing system receives a new message every time the negotiator responds because their system sends out a new notification without the ticket number in the subject line, so every notification causes a new ticket to be created.

I can see how this security measure may be good for the bank…er…no I can’t.  Each bank seems to be using their own version of this type of system, and since it’s a proprietary system for each bank, there’s no connection to my system at all.

There’s nothing more annoying, in my opinion, than systems that are implemented in the wrong context.  The idea behind this system is to put the messages in one location to take ownership of the correspondence, but by doing so, without transmitting the actual message in the e-mail, it adds steps.

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