That's actually half of your answer right there - and the answer for the question why banks don't want you to automate your finances. They want you to do every operation through their webpage, mobile app or branch office, because they want to sell more financial products to you.
> they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs
Being on a call with them is another perfect opportunity for them to do some upselling.
That said, your description of the authentication process sounds like a pathological case. Most banks aren't like that. The banks I use have all been streamlining authentication - but they do this by requiring users to go through the mobile app, which is full of attempts to sell you credits, insurance and investment accounts.
EDIT: two more points.
1) Some of the auth flow in banks may be (bank's interpretation of) regulatory requirements. This applies especially to banks that (like the ones I use) offer identity services for interacting with my government on-line. That is, one of the ways I can authenticate myself when filing taxes, or starting a company, or checking my medical receipts, or other stuff like this on-line, is through my bank's web page.
2) Let's look at behavior of banks through a different lens. There's one thing I want that, according to my research, no bank provides. I want a bullshit-free way to programmatically fetch my account balance. Say, an API token I could use with CURL - something I can set up and forget, so I can make myself an "account balance" widget containing up-to-date balances from one or more accounts of one or more different banks. I can't do that. It's an obvious thing to offer when building a digital service, but nobody offers it. There is a reason - and I posit that the reason is, they don't want to do it, because it would reduce my visits on their webpages / in their apps, depriving them of opportunity to advertise financial product to me. I.e. the purposeful creation of inefficiencies I talked about.
I've been told that this is nowdays commonplace among UK banks. It might be to do with regulation, but I don't think so.
Wrt. the ads, no ads are presented during the authentication flow. So I don't think that flow is cackhanded because of ads. Self-promotion occurs before I begin trying to authenticate (with a non-dismissable "call to action" that takes up half the screen real-estate on my laptop).
I actually think half the problem is "mobile first" - I don't use a mobile to access websites, because I'm too clumsy to type on a mobile. I think companies create a "mobile first" website, and then don't really bother with the "laptop next" bit. Infinite scroll, multi-part forms with one field per part, and widgets that can't be operated using a keyboard, seem to have conquered the world.
Why put effort into supporting desktop users, if mobile users are now the majority of visits, and desktop users are only going to diminish? I've never tried to use my bank's site using a mobile, but I bet it works better.
That's actually half of your answer right there - and the answer for the question why banks don't want you to automate your finances. They want you to do every operation through their webpage, mobile app or branch office, because they want to sell more financial products to you.
> they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs
Being on a call with them is another perfect opportunity for them to do some upselling.
That said, your description of the authentication process sounds like a pathological case. Most banks aren't like that. The banks I use have all been streamlining authentication - but they do this by requiring users to go through the mobile app, which is full of attempts to sell you credits, insurance and investment accounts.
EDIT: two more points.
1) Some of the auth flow in banks may be (bank's interpretation of) regulatory requirements. This applies especially to banks that (like the ones I use) offer identity services for interacting with my government on-line. That is, one of the ways I can authenticate myself when filing taxes, or starting a company, or checking my medical receipts, or other stuff like this on-line, is through my bank's web page.
2) Let's look at behavior of banks through a different lens. There's one thing I want that, according to my research, no bank provides. I want a bullshit-free way to programmatically fetch my account balance. Say, an API token I could use with CURL - something I can set up and forget, so I can make myself an "account balance" widget containing up-to-date balances from one or more accounts of one or more different banks. I can't do that. It's an obvious thing to offer when building a digital service, but nobody offers it. There is a reason - and I posit that the reason is, they don't want to do it, because it would reduce my visits on their webpages / in their apps, depriving them of opportunity to advertise financial product to me. I.e. the purposeful creation of inefficiencies I talked about.