Alterna: your online banking needs an upgrade
So my friend Marc-André Pigeon didn’t win a seat on the Alterna board of directors. Too bad. I generally like Alterna, despite their pronounced corporate drift – their mortgage rates are very competitive. But today I am ready to yank every last cent from them and deposit it in the first bank I can find with a decent online banking system.
I’ve whined about it before, and they’ve made improvements as a result. And I have seen it improve over the years. But I’m doing my taxes today and once again I will have to go back through twelve months of paper bank statements to put together a financial statement on my freelance business work because Alterna’ online banking won’t give me twelve months of bank statements at once.
Yes, I can download statements for the last 365 days in 90 day increments, but dudes, hard drive space is cheap. Would it kill ya to let me go back an extra four months? I mean, please. Buy another hard drive for your server.
I also do some banking with RBC where I can download my last seven years of statements. I gleefully put a big swatch of paper statements in the shredder (seven years is the statute of limitations for income tax) and signed up for electronic statements only – not a possibility with Alterna, for obvious reasons.
If you insist on acting like a bank – turning your credit union into a husk whose only role is to own the bank – better start providing services like a bank. And for me, that’s online service.
Addendum: CIBC – which has my credit card – isn’t perfect, but it’s better. It won’t let me go back more than 13 months. But that beats 365 days and it also lets me download “all available” transactions, rather than making me guess where my available data starts and stops.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
VanCity has the best online interface I’ve ever used. I haven’t checked out Alterna, but Desjardins is so bad it makes me want to cry. Solely on the basis of their online banking, I am moving over to Citizens’ Bank, which is VanCity by another name. (You can go back 7 year for account statements.) It has the very big disadvantage of not having bricks and mortar, which sometimes you need (about as often as you need a roll of quarters). I’ll hang on to Desjardins for that, but nothing else, especially since Desjardins charges $2.50 for walking into a branch other than your own and making a withdrawal! So olde tymey.
May 25th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Hi Chris,
I just ran across your blog and since I work for Alterna, I thought I’d comment. I agree with you, our online banking system has its limitations. The good news is we’re in the process of a complete overhaul. Our new online banking offering will be available early in the new year, and I expect you will be very impressed with the outcome. Stay tuned!
September 15th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
[...] I trash them when they’re bugging me, I should praise them when they do good. A while back I posted about how Alterna’s online banking made me waste a lot of time at tax time, when it could be [...]