Halifax online dealing hit by technical snags
From Financial Times March 10 p6 - no url as yet

Halifax's high-profile move on to the internet has fallen foul of the technology, with the online share dealing service running so slowly it becomes unusable.

Sue Concannon, managing director of the stockbroking service, admitted yesterday thet the web site had unexplained problems that her computing team had yet to trace.

The problems follow an embarrassing security flaw that forced the bank to close its online broking system for a day in November, when it became the first broker with serious security problems.

"We could have died waiting for their system" said one user, who said he had lost #500 because the shares he wanted to sell fell in the three hours it took him to deal. "We are absolutely jumping up and down here - it's appalling."

...

Ms Concannon said the probles were not caused by overloading, as the capacity of the systems had been more than doubled since launch in October and could cope with 2m users.

"I have apologised to customers myself and we are devoting considerable resources to solving the problem" she said.

The problems, she said, were "intermittent" and she pointed out that anyone who could not get throught on the internet could use the telephone dealing service.

-- Jim McAteer (jim_mcateer@hotmail.com), March 10, 2000