bank log-in once only
 

Before going away on holiday I used my shiney new Android tablet to log onto my bank account to see if it could do the necessary for eft payment of bills. It all worked well. At the end of my holiday, when I came to pay for our accommodation, it all failed to work in a most embarrassing way.

Basically, I got onto the log-in screen and entered my user name and then "proceed"ed in the normal way but the response from the bank was a message about "unable to process your request at this time". I don't know if it was an issue at the bank just at the time I tried. This failure to access has persisted on my tablet ever since although I have been able to access my account normally on my desktop Linux Mint machine.

Yesterday I enquired via PM to the bank if this is a known issue and their helpful tech person called me this morning. They think it is an issue with cached data and or pages and they talked me through clearing the cache on the tablet (I did say the tablet was new to me) which didn't help. They then suggested that there may be cached pages in my router (but my desktop machine can log in reliably, several time a day, if required) so that probably isn't it. Unfortunately, they were talking to me on a VOIP phone and rebooting the router lost the phone call (I wasn't thinking when I rebooted, I know that no internet means no phone!) so I lost the contact with them.

While I wait for them to call me back.......... has anyone an insight into this they might share with me?

Tablet is Galaxy Tab S, Android OS and standard "Internet" browser with ABP. As far as I can tell, there has been no updates installed during the time since the successful log-in and now.

Possibly, but unlikely. Browsers tend not to cache pages received over encrypted (https) connections.

Sounds like someone was desperate for ideas. That's utter nonsense. The typical cheap routers you find in the home don't do caching .... hell, they've got hardly enough built-in memory to run their own systems let alone cache a bunch of pages !

Your ISP might run a cache server on their network....but because of the nature of encrypted connections, as a transit network your ISP can't really cache the pages anyway. Also, in this day and age, most ISPs err towards packet shaping, rate limiting and FUPs rather than caching - with the exception of running streaming nodes to cache streams on-net.


Probably to do with your tablet's acceptance of cookies.

But if your bank doesn't provide an app for your phone then you may be up a creek without a paddle trying to make your bank's system work on the typical "cut-down" browsers found on tablets. Even more so if they are the sort of company that tests their websites on whatever they have in the office (i.e most likely to be Internet Exploder).

thanks mixture. My bank does have an App for banking but it can only be installed on one device, I already have the app on my mobile phone. The App is required to generate a fresh code number for each transaction/log-in irrespective of which machine is used to log in from.

further info:

I have been trying to log in through a "bookmarked" log in page, which always fails. If I go back to gurgle for the bank, select the home page, select "access full site" (it knows I am on a device that could use an App), select Internet Banking option and use the log in screen it then provides (which looks exactly the same as the bookmarked page) then everything works properly.

I don't understand this but at least I have a work around.

Rans6......

That has happened on a few banking sites in my experience and on each occassion 'Tech Support' has advised against the bookmarking.

If your bank offers a mobile website, I would try that, e.g. barclays.mobi

You could always install another browser and use that, Firefox, Opera work well on android

bank log-in once only
 

I have the same "app on one device only" issue. I sort of bypassed it by putting the app on my wife's phone so I could access the other account when we were travelling together.

Yes I know - must have wife's phone handy etc etc. And hers is the account with not much money in.

This could be connected with an oddity that I've seen in desktop Chrome and the android version. They both seem happy to write something to the bookmark when something goes wrong.

One example is that when my previous router couldn't access a webpage after it had lost the adsl connection it would put up a page referring me to my isp. If the original page request had come from a bookmark, that bookmark was hijacked to the 'refer to isp' page permanently. Deleting the bookmark was the only fix that I could find. That was on a win desktop.

I think that it was the same thing on an android pad (time/my memory ratio exceeded), but manifested in a slightly different way. Deleting the bookmark fixed it too.

Its possible that the bookmarked URL contains a session token. Which becomes invalid after some time. There are also some ways that a URL can 'interact' with a stored cookie which could be going stale.

Use a bookmark editing function in your browser to change the target URL to the one that Google presents you with.