German Online Banking

Another little rant...

I love my German bank account.  I can access it online, I can transfer money to my English account without having to pay fees and they give me free credit.

I don't love that they recently decided to beef up their online security with an electronic TAN generator.  I have one for my English account, but unlike that one, I have had to fork out nine Euros for my new one.  Had I not bought it, my internet banking would have been cut off.

Apart from having to pay for it, it has just taken me an hour, a phonecall, and being on the point of throwing the thing out of the window, for me to work out how to use it!  First I got a message saying I had to contact the bank, then the woman said I didn't have to call her, I had to register the thing myself online.  Having done this it said in order to transfer money, I had to put my card in the machine and hold it up to some flashy lights on the screen.  When this did nothing, time and time again, and after reading some pretty useless instructions, I realised that it gives me the option to generate a TAN without the flashy lights but it took me three attempts to work out how to insert a comma on the machine which locked me out of the machine!  Having registered it again, I managed to complete three two minute transactions an hour after I started the process.  Great...