549 Days and Still Broken: The Raiffeisenbank Story

Today marks 549 days since I reported a bug to Raiffeisenbank regarding account transaction notifications.

The oldest email from Raiffeisenbank I could find regarding the bug

Since then:

• I spoke to four different people at Raiffeisenbank
  • Last interaction is public on linkedin
• Received multiple assurances that it would get fixed
• Got a 300 CZK (~14 USD) voucher for the “inconvenience”

Yet the bug remains unfixed. And my patience is wearing thin.

The bug 🔗

Raiffeisenbank has a feature called inform me that should send an email notification when there is a movement on your account over a certain (configurable) threshold.

Inform me alert detail

However, no notification is sent when a periodic SEPA payment is executed. The alert works perfectly fine for every other payment type:

• domestic payments
• periodic domestic payments
• one-time SEPA payments

But not for periodic SEPA payments. And the bank seems entirely indifferent.

The workaround 🔗

The tech support acknowledged the bug and suggested a workaround when I reported the issue for the first time. The workaround was (and still is) to enable “payment notification” on every periodic SEPA payment.

Periodic SEPA payment detail

And to their credit, it works. However, there is a catch: you can’t edit Send notification configration for an existing payment! It can be set only when creating a new one. As shown above, setting up a new periodic SEPA payment requires many fields, making the process quite painful.

Catching up 🔗

A couple of months passed and I reached out to the bank again to check on the progress. I was told that the problem is in my setup:

Active Send notification prevents inform me emails from being sent for the payment in question. Please remove Send notification from the payment in order to make inform me work as expected.

Interesting twist given the bank previously acknowledged the problem is on their side! And even if that would be the case, which obviously isn’t - and it took me five more emails and two calls to clarify - then it would be a terrible user experience. The inform me feature does not mention does not work for payments with *Send notification* anywhere, not to mention would not make any sense from a user perspective.

Other annoyances 🔗

Another frustrating feature is that inform me emails do not mention fees which are charged for a specific payment. That would be too much to ask from a bank, right? Have fun reconciling your account balance from the inform me emails.

A developer’s guess 🔗

As a developer, I get it - it might not be trivial to fix. Banking systems are notoriously complex, rigid, often built on legacy systems and outdated technologies.

My guess for the underlying issue? Periodic SEPA payments are processed through a different component/system than any other payment and cannot be easily hooked into the notify me feature. All of the above suggests that the inform me feature is based on payments rather than account movements - not the best design decision as far as I can tell.