Newsgroups: uk.finance uk.misc
Subject: Co-operative Bank withdraws Internet service for non-Windows business customers
From: real-not-anti-spam-address@apple-juice.co.uk (D.M. Procida)
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 12:10:55 +0000

Apologies if this not entirely the right place; I couldn't find a
charter for uk.finance, and it seems like an at least tangentially
relevant issue (while anything seems to go in uk.misc).

The Co-operative Bank has just launched a new business banking service,
Acumen, to replace its existing service. The new service, unlike the old
one, supports only Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer.

This means that non-Windows users will be excluded from their Internet
banking service within a few weeks, when the old service is withdrawn.

Personal account holders and customers of smile.co.uk may find in the
future that they too are excluded from Internet banking services if the
Bank continues with this policy, while customers of other banks will be
at risk if this becomes a trend.

Pressure needs to be brought to bear quickly upon the Bank to encourage
them to do something about it.

An online petition has been created at 

     

to make it easy to register your opposition to this move.

If you are a Co-operative Bank customer please take a few seconds to
read the petition and sign if you agree with it. Please forward this
message to other Co-operative Bank customers if you feel they would be
interested in receiving it.

If you sign, please indicate the operating system you use on the
petition to help the Bank realise that this is not merely a
Macintosh-compatability issue, but an open standards issue.

Daniele
-- 
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