I’ve noticed a lot of ads lately for banks which offer free online banking and bill pay. Which strikes me as odd. Free online billpay isn’t a “key differentiator” in the banking market, because everyone (or nearly so) offers it now. The banks would be fools not to! If they wanted to really stand out among their competitors, they should offer “I don’t care what time of day it is” online billpay. In my own situation, if I don’t schedule the online payment by 5 p.m. local, the payment is delayed an extra day. Really? Do all the little 1s and 0s which make up my transaction have a quitting time too? Do they need to get home through rush hour traffic to put their baby bits to bed? Are they tired in the evening because they have to start work so early the next day? Hmmmmm…

I puts on my business process analyst hat, and I thinks to myself: there’s a human involved in this process somewhere, OR, there’s an artificial constraint on the system to observe “business hours” in a world of bits and bytes. Either way, there’s an opportunity here for some enterprising and forward thinking bank! If only one of their employees would read my blog!