Banks in Israel are pretty annoying. And that is if you are lucky. Coming from the US (where I used to enjoy such luxuries as being able to deposit my money into an interest free checking account where the bank can use it to earn money for itself, and not be charged for the privilege), many aspects of the Israeli banking system have required some reeducation on my part. That said, there are some things that they have done adequately – Internet accessibility. On the web site of my bank (Bank haPoalim), I can view all of the details of my accounts, and can pay just about any bill that I have to pay. It is not done perfectly, but at least I can avoid going to the actual bank, and I am not charged for using the site.

Bank haPoalim has also been pretty good sending official communications to me electronically. When I first opened the account, I would tend to receive a few envelopes per month, none of which I actually needed, all of which wasted money, paper and resources (this is pretty common). However, a couple of years ago, haPoalim started a service whereby I could opt to receive all bank communications through the bank website. They even gave me a 50 NIS gift card for signing up (good move on their part, since they saved more than that amount in postage alone over the first half year).

Nothing has changed with this setup until today – I logged onto my account (as I do at least 3-4 times per week) and saw a piece of incoming bank correspondence that told me the following (rough translation):

You use our Doar-Net service to receive bank correspondence electronically through the web site, in place of receiving it through snail mail. However, this service can only be provided if you sign onto your account at least once every 90 days. It you do not sign on to your account again before May 2, 2009, the Doar-Net service will be canceled, and you will begin to receive bank correspondence through the post office. So please sign in again before that date.

Well, it is strange that the letter implies that I have not signed on to my online account since February 2 (90 days before the threatened cancellation), as I have signed many times since then. However, the really strange thing is that they are sending me a letter telling me that I need to sign on to my account, using a service that I can only access after I have signed into my account. If I really hadn’t been on my account since Feb 2, and wasn’t going to sign in until after May 2, there would be no way for me to know that this would affect anything. And once I do sign on to my account then message itself becomes irrelevant. Quite puzzling.