Barclays Pin Sentry – one hoop too many (rant)

In an attempt to combat online fraud Barclays Bank have introduced Pin Sentry, a glorified calculator come card reader for use in conjunction with online banking. As far as I can tell you pop your card in to it which then generates another security number for online verification.

My Pin Sentry finally arrived this morning – I had to order one 10 days ago after I tried to pay a bill online but instead received a Barclays ‘2-fingured‘ salutation and then promptly disabled my online banking facility without warning – basta*ds!

Anyhoo, I thought I’d give it whirl.. but the Pin Sentry thingy rejected my card and just left me scratching my head. A phone call to a helpful lady in a seemingly distant call centre … (errr let’s just say most likely outside of EEC where spicy foods are most likely the the norm) informed me that Barclays are issuing a new type of card to work with Pin Sentry, but oopps they forgot to tell customers like me & the Doris it seems.

As we have a joint account the Dearest tried with her card but it seems she will need her own Pin Sentry thingy and ooopps, once again Barclays didn’t email or even snail-mail us about these changes. So we now have no online banking and just in time for all those end-of-year sales, hmmm – I wonder if eBay and Amazon will take an I.O.U?

googling Pin Sentry confirms that we are not alone, this looks like it could evolve into a bit of PR disaster for Barclays if the right arses aren’t kicked in time. I feel sorry for the poor smucks in local branches and in call centres that have to fire-fight these sorts of problems.

Being just a simple IT tech I’ve never understood how people supposedly ‘at the top‘ can make such complete balls-ups of simple stuff like this, how hard can it be tell your customers about future changes?

PayPal offer US customers a far simpler secure ID with industry hints that it could also be used for other secure websites, and RSA has been doing this sort thing for over 10 years as any BT Employee will tell you. Barclays on the other hand seem to by trying reinvent the wheel… maybe I’ll drop IT and become a financial analyst.

There must be a HUMONGOUS opportunity for one or more of the big names such as Verisign or perhaps even google to get behind a single device that could validate users with just one id in the way that google checkout and openid do now?

Update January 1st 2008 – Barclays finally got around a new card that does work on December 31st and an email today. Trouble although the email is dated December 24th 2007 it was actually sent on January 1st 2008, someone’s dropped a big old bollock here then. (Oh, and they spelt my name wrong too, been with ‘em over 30 years, you’d have thought they could have got that bit right.)