It’s been a while since my previous look at Romanian internet banking services. The reviewed banks have made steps forward in various ways. The usage of authentication tokens has fallen out of favor, replace by SMS-based tokens. That’s good, who wants another token dongle around they risk losing? However, BCR is yet a bastion of token devices.
There’s also been progress in terms of user interfaces: Banca Transilvania, the proud owner of the most useless banking web application in history finally upgraded their website for cross-browser support while removing the ridiculous certificate-based authentication. However, their service (BT24) is still bordering uselesness.
Banca Transilvania is one of the few banks that seem to think Romania is the only country in the world and due to that they demand that even international transfers towards Ronanian accounts should use Romanian-style addresses. Example: if you want to transfer money from a UAE account to Romania, you can’t because in UAE the bank doesn’t have your street address, instead they record a PO box for correspondence. Of course, Banca Transilvania will reject the transfer due to these, even though normally in a civilized country all one needs for a transfer is an IBAN and a SWIFT. Go figure!
Speaking of that, the internet banking application of Banca Transilvania requires a ridiculous amount of information for a transfer. Why exactly do you need to input TWO countries related to the person you want to send money to? And why do you also have to input yet another country for the bank of that person? Compare this to a more civilized internet banking application (featured: Credit Agricole), where the only info you need to provide are: the name of the person, their IBAN and the SWIFT. That seems reasonable. What difference does it make if the person is a Bulgarian living in France? You are logged in to your account and you need to send money to a certain account in a certain bank, identified by the IBAN and the SWIFT respectively.
We can only hope that Romanian banks will be able to close the gap between them and the more civilized banks.
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