i’ve been whinging on and on about natwest bank and the fact that they won’t let me use their online banking with the browser and operating system of my choice for years [1,

2,

3,

4 and there’s probably more]. i finally put my money where my mouth is and have a shiny new cahoot current account. natwest have been telling me that they are ‘testing netscape 6/mozilla’ for well over two years. call me cynical but i’m not convinced they are ‘testing’ at all. for me online banking is not a nice add on for a current account but the core component of what i want from a bank.

it was far less hassle to move accounts than i expected it to be and took less than a week from opening the account to being fully set up with all my direct debits and standing orders moved across and having a new debit card in my hands too. i chose cahoot because i’ve had one of their credit cards for three and a half years so i know that their online service is great. and if it goes down the pan i now know how simple it is to move myself elsewhere.

(the reason i chose natwest to start with? coz they offered £40 cash to students opening accounts with them in 1990. i don’t want to add up how much they’ve made out of me over the past 13 years because i fell for that bit of marketing. not that the alternatives available at that point were any better i expect. it shouldn’t have taken me 13 years to overcome the inertia to switch banks though.)

i feel liberated. plus i’m getting 3.45% aer on my cash, as opposed to 0.2% from natwest, which doesn’t hurt either.