When designing and writing software, it is important to understand who our customers are and their needs. If we fail at this, we risk providing a bad experience, which is not great for anyone. But in other cases, we could negatively impact the lives of our users.
Imagine, for example, that when your bank releases a new feature, it locks you out of your money for practical purposes. The bank, intentionally, does not let you make online transfers or payments, and you are unable to go to a branch or an ATM. This is precisely what happened to me.
This article is a review of this case, both as a software engineer and as a customer. Although I was not involved in the project, I can make enough educated guesses to take some valuable lessons from this bad experience.
New Bank Regulation
In Chile, it was common practice to use coordinate cards to make bank transfers and payments, despite them being a known source of scams.
During the last decade, Chilean banks had introduced a series of alternative payment approval methods (mainly mobile apps). In 2022, my bank, Banco Security, created an app for this purpose, but I was forced to keep using the coordinate cards, as I was unable to receive a text message the bank would send to activate it.
Things changed in May 2024, when the Chilean parliament approved a law to give the Chilean Financial Market Commission (CMF) power to set minimum security and authentication standards for payments and transfers. Following through, in 2025 the CMF formalised a new regulation to reinforce customer authentication and removed printed methods such as coordinate cards.
Don’t Touch Your Money
In line with this new regulation, Banco Security sent me a few messages to inform me that coordinate cards would no longer work by a given date, and that I needed to download and enable the new mobile app.
I contacted the bank to explain that I do not have a Chilean phone number, and since the bank does not allow registering foreign phone numbers, I was unable to receive a text message to enable the app.
In response, my executive suggested that I could use roaming. I explained that that was not an option, since I did not have a Chilean number to start with. And after that, she just ghosted. The same happened when I tried to contact customer support.
This was a big deal for me, because the only way I had to take money from my account was to make online transfers. I could not go to an ATM or branch to make a withdrawal.
In other words, the bank was so concerned about the safety of my money that they didn’t let anyone touch it, not even me.
What Went Wrong
Many things can and will go wrong when releasing new software projects or sunsetting some of our products. Some will have a bigger impact than others, and we must keep an eye on them.
In any project we do, we must consider what our core services are, and ensure that they won’t be disrupted. For example, Gmail’s core service is to send and receive emails. It’d be really inconvenient if I could not search for past emails and I’d be quite frustrated if this was unavailable. But being unable to send an email, or my recipient not receiving it, could be a catastrophe.
Similarly, one of the main duties of a bank is to keep our money safe, and give us access to it as requested. This particular bank neglected to consider that when enforcing this new safety mechanism, they would lock out some of their customers from their money.
Whether there was a conscious decision to go ahead despite knowing the impact on their customers, or this was just something they did not consider carefully, this suggests to me that there is something deeply wrong with the way in which this bank works.
Key Takeaways
As I mentioned before, I believe that the main cause of this problem that affected several other customers of this bank was that they made incorrect assumptions. I wrote an article on this as well if you’re interested. The key thing is that we should always challenge assumptions, especially if they will impact our critical mission.
It is also important to highlight that our decisions can have a huge impact on people’s lives. And this is everyone’s responsibility. If we notice that someone else’s decision will have negative consequences on our customers, we should speak up. Otherwise, we just become silent accomplices.
Cheers!
José Miguel
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