Latest opinions that Keith Appleyard has shared on Finextra

Join the Community

24,246

Expert opinions

40,780

Total members

335

New members (last 30 days)

214

New opinions (last 30 days)

29,313

Total comments

Join Sign in

Keith Appleyard

IT Consultant

available for hire

Member since

17 Aug 2007

Location

Bromley

View Keith Appleyard's full profile

Keith's opinions

Barclays On-line Banking deserves better error messages

Yesterday 1st January I logged in to Barclays Internet Banking as usual, to make a payment to a new Payee. When I progressed to submit the payment, I got an error message no.6 "we have technical issues, please try again later". Thinking the service might be down for planned outages on it being New Years Day, I waited 5 hours and tried aga...

02 January 2014 /payments Whatever...

RBS does have robust procedures

I consider myself primarily an RBS Customer, with other on-line accounts at many other Banks including Barclays & Halifax. Overall I am very reassured by the RBS processes, however ..... I do find it a pain that if I need to change the transaction reference to a pre-existing Payee (eg Invoice number), I do have to dig out the Cardreader. When m...

01 October 2013 /payments Whatever...

National Savings and Investments are rather too lethargic

National Savings & Investments : Once you've bought your Premium Bonds online then you are ’obliged’ to register with NS&I’s "Online and Phone Service", ostensibly for your “Security and Convenience”. Until they’ve processed your registration (which has to be done on paper), you can’t access your Account on-line. If you try you ge...

17 April 2013 /security Whatever...

RBS Internet Banking is not for the English

I had fun with RBS Internet Banking on Sunday. When I went to Login as usual via a page dedicated to RBS Customers in England, I got an error message that my Login credentials hd not been recognised. I contacted their Help Desk via Chatroom, and they assured me everything was working correctly, and what I needed to do was delete all my Cookies &...

28 January 2013 Whatever...

RBS don't seem to understand basic book-keeping rules

RBS is reported as saying that all Customer Accounts are back to normal. They may well be from a monetary perspective, but the data still remains corrupt. I now have on my Business Account 3 BACS credits, one for nearly £500, all with a generic description of “RBS TRANS 220612”, which fails to identify the Customer or the Invoice number. As I h...

26 June 2012 /payments Whatever...

PCI is not onerous - it's too weak

Despite all the bleating about PCI over the years, I found it to be too weak. With all the focus on Cardholder Data - as being that on the Mag Stripe - namely Cardnumber, Cardholder Name, Expiry Date and Security Code - I found many Merchants & Service Providers treated it as a 'max' rather than 'min' level of security. I performed due diligenc...

13 January 2012 /payments Whatever...

Citi demonstrates lack of good Security practice - ditto BBC

As reported, this greatly surprises me - apparently placing the Credit Card number within the URL, and thus by changing the URL exposes other Credit Card details within having to go through the Access Validation routine. On the one hand you'd assume the system designers didn't 'actually' specify it to be this way, but that the programmer didn't ask...

16 June 2011 /security Whatever...

How Security savvy are Sony?

Yesterday (Wed) we had Sony being not very re-assuring, saying "While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding secu...

28 April 2011 /security /regulation Whatever...

How to get hold of 8 million dollars

I recall some 25 years ago being told via e-mail to change the Bank Account that my employers Direct Debits would be credited to from a High Street branch of Lloyds to one in a small local village with a population of less than 1,000. When I kicked up a stink requesting higher authority (we were talking about £700,000 a week even in those days) at ...

05 April 2011 /security /regulation Whatever...

Epsilon breach is quite far reaching

I've worked with Epsilon on a few occasions over the years. Hilton Hotels has outsourced all of the processing associated with their HiltonHonors Loyalty program to Epsilon, which includes having your Credit Card details on file to back up any paid Reservation you make. Hilton has contacted me already. IDG News Service has confirmed that the follo...

05 April 2011 /security /regulation Whatever...