There's an App For That

And I only Barclays online on my desktop (32 inch screen + nice keyboard) to make payments. Their app is useful to see my Bcard balance at the same time and every contactless payment results in a notification fairly quickly.

The *REALLY* important thing to remember is that you DO *NOT* make it *easier* (for yourself) to see these notifications on the lock screen without unlocking your phone. If your phone is nicked this is how the thief gets the bank to remind 'you' (him) forgotten login detaisl and see the all-important one-time code(s).

Also put a pin on the *SIM* as well, to stop the thief doing a sim-swap which is also how they get full access to your phone and banking details.

Revolut is NOT a bank (yet) !!!. It was just an e-money platform originally which people used primarily for cross border money transfers.

Some (?all) of these e-money platforms are only contactable using web-chat or similar so if all your money vanishes, then have fun trying to get through to their 'fraud' department.

People might love to hate the big four banks, but they have their uses, which includes high street presence (sort of).

That is changing as I said in my OP, a lot of accounts are only available now via an app.

When I used a 'TOPS' course in computing (early 1979) to move away from working in the pathology labs as a lab technician I ended up at the London Hospital Whitechapel working on their hospital-wide Univac 418-III 'minicomputer' system (massive 1960's tech with vacuum tape drives, vertical spinning drums, 256 Mb multi-platter disks and a card reader the size of a car). The hospital real time system ran as a continuous batch job driving 96 terminals around the hospital (mostly Uniscopes with 16 lines of 64 characters) and the whole lot was written in Assembler using punch cards.

The thought of sitting in front of a VDU and typing your code in online and compiling/linking without asking the operators, was a pipe dream.

If you haven't put a pin on your SIM, *and* disallowed notifications to appear on the lock screen without 'logging' in,then you are effectively handing full access to your banking apps to the thief.

Happens all the time on the trains when the ticket inspector asks to see the digital railcard that confirms the right to buy a discounted ticket. "Oh, sorry, my phone is dead, I can't show you".

Having worked for the Midland Bank Group treasury and NM Rothchild asset management, I can assure you that banking systems are so complicated and dependent on myriads of external systems, no project manager has the courage to make any major changes, never mind rewriting it.

Apart from which the people who did the original design and coding are long gone so nobody really knows why a particular bit of code does what it does. Much easier to just keep on buying faster processors and keeping the old legacy COBOL code at the core and surround it with all the new online/interactive flashy stuff.

No I'm not, I don't have any banking apps on my 'phone! :-)

It is interesting to see them advertised "as a bank" on YouTube. That is creating the impression they are a bank by stating the banking services they offer.

I prefer authenticator based 2FA. No need for a signal and no need for a code to be sent anywhere.

Then you haven't shown a railcard and pay full price. That wasn't hard was it.

There are plenty of laws that have a "tough luck mate" end to them. I don't see why this should be any different.

I go a stage further, and have a script that mimics the authenticator. I don't even need my phone to be near!

"to arrange onlien savings"

In another place, that would have been be labelled as a TWATBILI.

(That Was A Typo But I Like It)

and for 99.9999% of people the word processor of the time that ran on it did everything that they need from a word processor today :)

Ah the good old days when no-one wrote any comments or descriptions.

I have been on the receiving end of that with hardware design languages, trying analyse convoluted code line by line, and then having to write a requirements based on the findings.

I think you will find that old COBOL programs are exceptionally well documented.

And they are kept simply because after 30 years the bugs have all been fixed.

Alternatively you can have pre generated tokens. Although they are best locked in a safe for a real; disaster.

The Win11 Phone app, allows you to use SMS via the PC keyboard. Better is WhatsApp.