hah, which will take about a month after the new website lauches, I bet.

heh.

Got my letter today.

A new website...hmmm I wonder if they got tired of everyone saying it looked like it was made by a first grader :)

HELLOOO KIDS YOU ARE MISSING THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE LETTER THAT WAS SENT YOU!!! E.D. IS UPPING INTEREST RATES TO 5.25 PERCENT!!! MY MONEY IS GOING TO ED AS SOON AS THAT HAPPENS. WHY WOULD I EVER USE A CD WHEN I CAN FLIP LIKE THIS...

Should we be concerned about ED's recent drop in rating from three to two stars ("below industry average")?

where do you see a rating D. Handa? Please advise.

Sorry, neglected to state I was referring to Safe & Sound Rating system on Bankrate.com:

1 Superior «««««
2 Sound ««««
3 Performing «««
4 Below industry average ««
5 Weak «
No Report Complete data not available
No Report "U"
Closed Institution is closed Closed

ED was rated 3 stars over last 18 months since starting their online website. Most banks listed are 3 to 4 stars. Last week ED dropped to two stars.

BTW, the stars ranking is an inverted ranking system. ie 5 stars is "Superior," 1 star is "failing." ED is now 2 stars, or "below industry average."

I got into the new website this morning. It looks like the same functionality with new graphics. The security feature(s) were clumsy at best. I haven't been able to get back into the site since 10 a.m. this morning (it's now past 2). I wish they'd stayed with the simple but works formula.

What in the devil is going on at ED?? Its late in the day on Monday (July 24) and still no access to my account. Had been announced that new site would be available at 9am but its now 5 hours beyond that and still waiting. I'm certainly aware of all the tech problems one can have when transitioning to a new website but they had all weekend to find em and fix em.....this is no way to run a bank!!

Still down at 9:50 EST. They suck! Simplicity is best. Stick to simple and use the savings to ratchet up the APR by 1/10 of a percent.

Since *attempting* to access the new site, I have been locked out three times (using the access codes that required 2 separate calls into their flaky customer service). I have always been pro-ED due to their "highest yield" approach, but am now having second thoughts. You'd think the largest bank in the US would be able to cobble together a website that wouldn't crash.

It's now 24 hours later and I still get hung up when I try to get in. When I am in, I can't get my account history to work. I'm grumpy but I have to say that while the site graphics are improved it's basically the same functionality only it doesn't work.

Just for the record, its 12:02am EST and the "Sorry, we are too busy" web page does not even come up -- Let me guess, the web site redesign was all done and tested in India -- works great -- noT!

Disturbingly, I have also noticed security issues in the new interface. I won't make it worse by commenting on what they are. However it appears that they've valued branding over function, security and performance. Not what one would want from a bank -- online or off.

As an IT professional, I can tell you exactly what went wrong. First, only one IP is listed in the A record (however they at least outsource their DNS to professionals -- worldnic -- so the DNS is working flawlessly). Having only one IP in the address record means ABSOLUTELY NO FAIL-OVER should things get busy. On a product roll-out where all your customers will be hitting the server (yes I said server -- singular -- as in one machine) all at the same time, is _incredibly_ stupid. Not ignorant, but stupid! Also, they chose bell atlantic (Verizon) for their ISP, draw your own conclusions.

Today is Wednesday, and they are still saturated, I can't even ping their router, it's like a planned DDoS attack (only the DoS is coming from their own customer base!) This will cost them plenty, however on the bright side, since the federal government mandates that they MUST have a certain percentage of personal savings, matching funds they borrow from the fed (which they have already loaned out) now with everyone pulling out of ED because of this, they will be forced to offer _huge_ interest rates to get us to come back.

Does anyone else remember the S&L crisis, and the 10%+ rates they were offering back in the 80's to comply with federal requirements? :-) Expect something along those lines coming shortly. I can hardly wait! :-)

CIO -- and one who is emphatically NOT stupid!

Internet savvy hsbc has failover on their servers -- so this kind of fiasco can't happen (or rather is less likely to happen) to them.

hsbcdirect.com 60 IN A 161.113.0.22
hsbcdirect.com 60 IN A 161.113.4.22

Emigrant Direct however does not have fail-over and thus this current fiasco.

emigrantdirect.com 7200 IN A 68.163.112.94

These are the actual DNS records of the two domains, just as shown above.

Fail-over load balancing is ubiquitous on the internet -- can anyone explain to me how an institution of such wealth could find and hire such IT incompetents as Emigrant Bank clearly has? At first I assumed they'd outsourced the upgrade to India, but the hosting traces to their own facilities in New York. Perhaps they just hired the cheapest, ahem, _emigrants_ that they could find? ;-)

CIO

I have been following the recent ED bashing with some amount of bemusement. Being an ED customer I also was frustrated by the poor response times and performance issues after the launch of their new web site. However having been in IT for more years then I care to count I decided to wait it out and see how long it took to get things under control. While Monday and Tuesday were horrible, it seems by Wednesday morning they had resolved most of their issues and the response time was quite good and has remained that way ever since. I see lots of talk about poor planning but I wonder how many of you have actually done projects on this scale. I am most amused by the comments by “CIO and one who is emphatically not stupid! CIO of a major ISP�. For a “CIO of a major ISP� you seem incredibly misinformed. Wherever did you get the idea that having only one “A� record means “ABSOLUTELY NO FAIL-OVER� have you never heard of multi-site BGP failover, load balancers, or Mutually high Availability load balancers, or any of a dozen other ways to achieve fault tolerance with only one IP address. If you check www.ibm.com, or better yet www.cisco.com you will find they both have only one “A� record. I guess their CIO’s and thousands of network architects and engineers are incredibly stupid as well, at least by your definitions. Having done a lot of work with both organizations I know that is not the case. While on the subject you state “I can not even ping their router� and from this you conclude that they are still saturated. I would be very disappointed in their network/security staffs if you could ping their router. First rule of network security is to disable ping. You are a CIO of a major ISP and do not know this. Please let us all know which ISP so we can exclude it from our vendor list. Does your bashing of Verizon have anything to do with your ISP’s status? I doubt you are even an IT professional, just an individual with a little knowledge, very little. If you want to bash them for launching a web site without sufficient performance tuning, go ahead, but at least get your facts correct.

An Actual IT Professional.

EmigrantDirect's security is faulty. Social Security Numbers are required for every transaction, with a high risk for id theft and fraud. Customer service is lousy, beware.

Two and half weeks later and still not able to get into site on a consistent basis. Very poor service to top it off. Not a way to do business.

Is it me or did the ED website just got faster? I tried to access their website a couple of times in a row, and each time it was very fast. It can be a coincidence of course, and hence I would like to know if everyone is experiencing this welcome change

I've tried several times to access ED this afternoon and can't get in at all. When I go to emigrantdirect.com I get:

EmigrantDirect.com
This page should automatically redirect to our web site’s home page.If your browser does not redirect in 5 seconds, please Click Here to reach our home page.

"Clicking Here" does absolutely nothing!

I'm having the same frustrating situation as Christine, have been attempting to access ED for the pass couple of hours and still getting the same message as above. "Clicking here" does absolutely nothing!

I also have been having problems accessing the ED website ever since they switched to the new one. And when I do get in, sometimes the lag is very slow.

I've had no issues w/Emigrant after the first week on the new site. It's a major upgrade from the prior version. And, their rates are outstanding.

I remember the same BS being posted about ET in 2003 when they had some trading system issues. I immediately bought some stock as the bashing continued. $5 per share to now over $20 per share in under three years. I wish I could do the same with Emigrant.