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> Yet it takes me 30 seconds to log into my bank This has little to do with bloat. There's a complex array of backend systems involved in logging you in to you
by pards 2y ago
> Yet it takes me 30 seconds to log into my bank
This has little to do with bloat. There's a complex array of backend systems involved in logging you in to your bank: Authentication, authorization, customer system, separate account systems for each account type (debit, credit, loans, investments), etc. The bank's login process has to wait for all of them to respond and collate the data before returning control to the UI.
Rest assured, online banking teams spend a lot of time trying to optimize login performance but they're limited by the slowest of the downstream systems. There's a lot of data on that "account summary" page you see after logging in.
The login process performance could be improved by landing on a simple "welcome" page but the majority of people want to see all of their account balances immediately upon login.
Source: I have worked on several online bank websites and mobile apps.
- carlosjobim 2y agoWhy are the backend systems slow?
- pards 2y agoFor a variety of reasons - Old on-prem mainframes - Old mainframes hosted by vendors - Network latency (cloud <--> on-prem, cloud <--> vendor) - Required sequence of calls (auth -> account list -> account balances) I'm not defending it. Many of these systems should be updated but the banks are notoriously slow to act and risk-averse.
- zild3d 2y ago> The bank's login process has to wait for all of them to respond Why? If e.g. one loan account is slow to respond seems like letting you in once auth is successful and showing a loading state for that slow account is a better experience
- wycy 2y agoIt may be that they've discovered that people feel more comfortable with bank logins taking a while. Maybe if it's too snappy people feel like it's insecure. Sort of like how tax software intentionally adds loading screens to make people feel like it's doing a lot of work behind the scenes even though it's essentially a glorified spreadsheet with instant calculations. I have no data on this, purely just a theory as to why they may not feel an incentive to make login feel faster.