Bank of America has an online banking feature called My Portfolio.  If you've never used it before, it is basically a way to bring all your financial accounts together into one single view.  It gives you the ability to view at a quick glance your checking, savings, and credit card accounts even if they are all at different banks other than Bank of America.

With any solution that integrates information from multiple heterogeneous sources, there are bound to be problems and there are some with BoA's My Portfolio.  On at least 3 occassions in the last 3 months, various linked accounts I have setup in My Portfolio absolutely will not update for days at a time.  I am getting an error message that says my username or password is wrong.  I know this isn't the case because I've previously retyped them correctly and I can login to the website where my account is linked from with that username and password.

For whatever reason, the savings account which is held at another bank and setup in My Portfolio seems to flake out each time BoA has problems with My Portfolio.  We are currently on day 6 of the current "maintenance" period.  I use that term loosely, but that is the word BoA support uses when you call and ask about the problem which I've called about twice now in the last couple of days.  The standard response I keep getting is essentially this: "We are aware of some problems with the My Portfolio section of online banking.  We have a team working on it, but we do not have an estimated time that work will be completed."  Seriously, 6 days and counting?  If the purchasing application that I wrote for work recently wasn't working for 6 days, I wouldn't have a job any more.  How hard can it really be to debug and fix the problem?  And why not provide the users with a better error message instead of telling me my account's username and password is wrong when clearly it isn't?  They either don't have any user-interface designers on staff at BoA or the ones they do need to find another line of work.  Failure.

Anyone else think it is kind of ridiculous for a multi-billion dollar company like BoA to have these kinds of problems over and over again?  What do you think of the "error message" which really doesn't explain the actual problem to the user?