Jaja: another failing login

 Just when life was starting to seem like a long series of unsatisfactory authentication attempts, I went to download this month's Jaja statement, and the login failed.

Either my credential management has gone to pot, or many companies have decided not to bother persisting passwords any more, saying something like "well they can just do an account rescue via email" at the meeting where they decide whether to bother.

In Jaja's case, they recently rebranded from Post Office to Jaja, and everything changed, including the web site.  So may as well forget all the passwords, and force resets.  There is probably an assumption underlying their decision, that people are so bad at managing their passwords, that they aren't going to know whether they forgot it or the service provider forgot it, and account rescues are so much the normal flow of things, no one's going to care.  This is wrong.  For a customer who manages their login details carefully, it's jarring and annoying to have them stop working.  It's tedious to go through "account rescue" admin.  And it's offensive when the service provider projects their own failure onto the customer, pretending it's the customer who's forgotten it.

So I embark on the account rescue exercise.

I don't have in-app notification.

Email gives an error "This service is currently unavailable.  Please try again later", depicted above.

SMS gives the appearance of having done something, but no SMS ever arrives.  It's now the next day, and no SMS arrived.

This is the reality of the "paperless statements" everyone wants to force onto their customers.  The statements are not accessible.  The accounts are impossible to log in to, impossible to rescue.  Opening an envelope with a statement works.  It's a known quantity, using a uniform inbox.  "Paperless statements" doesn't work.  It's a fiction.  At best, it sometimes works.  In reality, it's an unbounded amount of administration, mostly futile, to maybe get some statements in horrid pdf format, after working through many web site fails on the way.  That's what paperless statements is.