In some alternative universe, this clearly makes sense.
I don’t want to be a Barclays customer. But they just bought Egg, with whom I took out a credit card years ago that I never use. Egg’s old site got closed down today, so I’m trying to log on to clear the balance so I can leave Barclays. Then all my banking will be with those nice people at the co-op.
But here’s the thing, to get into my account I need to create a new username and password. Fair enough – that I can cope with. What is just bizarre is that my username has to be 8-16 characters long and contain both letters and numerals, whereas my password is just a six digit number. Isn’t that the wrong way round? How is that more secure than the normal way of doing things (ie the other way round) and do you want to take bets on how much Barclays spends on customer support, resetting accounts?