I arrived home a little earlier, and while writing my first paper for my last class before obtaining my master’s degree, I decided to check out Emigrant Direct’s new website. There has been a lot of talk over on an earlier entry about how many have not been able to access the website and have been locked out.
However, I was able to log in with the access code I received in the mail without any problem. The new interface looks much better, and I see I’m easily able to add more subaccounts and more linked outside accounts for electronic deposits and withdrawals.
Sometime this week, I will test these features. At first look, this is a great improvement. Huzzah and kudos! Yes, they could have planned better and avoided today’s full day of downtime that has been widely reported. I hope there were no emergencies with customers needing to make withdrawals immediately. This is another reminder that we humans are constantly increasing our reliance on technology, and technology is run by fallable humans.
Interested in what the blogosphere has to say? Click here to see what personal finance bloggers have to say about Emigrant Direct, via pfblogs.org.
Late Night Update (3:30 am): Emigrant Direct’s website seems to be down again.
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I’m with you. Downtime aside, this is a big improvement.
Now all those folks who loved ING’s “Interest Earned This Month” feature can get their greedy jollies from ED, too. Among other things.
I’m addicted to the “Interest Earned This Month” month feature that ING has, and I am pleased that ED has incorporated this on their new website. I was able to schedule new deposits with ED. Hopefully, the problems with downtime will be resolved shortly….
I won’t be home for a few weeks to get my mail to login. Do you still have to send in a check to link new accounts or do they have the trial deposit method now? It sounds like they have made some good changes so far, hopefully they have or will change that too.
I have tried for 2 days now to log in. Yesterday I got nothing, like ED had disappeared off the net. Today I get some generic “Temporarily unavailable due to extreme volume” page. Somebody seriously botched something over there. If they don’t get it straightened out soon, they will be losing customers, both new and existing – I count myself as one of them. At the very least they should be giving some timeline to when this will be remedied on the page, or send out emails to customers with that info.
It’s so slow it’s unusable, if it isn’t just giving me an error code. Not a good job of planning at all. I have a transfer I need to cancel, too.
Now the site now says “We’re sorry, page unavailable due to extreme volume, blah, blah…” and the customer service number I tried calling is busy. Really bad planning. This is something they’ve had in the works for months – you’d think they’d have some clue of what they’re doing by now.
I just called at 10:20 EDT and a customer service representative answered within 2-3 minutes. She sounded pretty harried (I can only imagine all the angry calls they are getting). Anyway, I asked about how I could withdrawl my money and she said that if I sent an email with my full name, last four digits of SSN and the amount to transfer to customerservice@emigrantdirect.com, they would manually process the transfer to a bank account I already have on file.
I think I might wait out the website outage to see if the new site works OK rather than trust an email. If there is a decent explanation for the website outage I might even consider keeping my money there.
I was playing around with the new Emigrant Direct account. I dont see a way of linking Emigrant Direct to ING Direct anymore. They require a check to sent for verification. Interestingly exact same problem with ING Direct website. I mailed ING and received a curt reply saying you need a check to link an external account.
This means we can no longer establish a link between ING and Emigrant. Thats not good for both of them. I am considering move everything to HSBC if this continues.