Royal Bank of Scotland (and Natwest) just missed my business.

[Note: the information below was correct when it was published, please read the update at the end]  

You can judge my loyalty to the Williams F1 team by the fact that - after several miserable years of results, I still call myself a fan. Williams' main sponsor last year was RBS. I'm thinking about getting a new credit card and I do try to use people who sponsor my teams  - and RBS turns up on a number of lists as one of the better deals right now, I thought it made sense to with them. Sadly - and I say this having worked with some of the RBS IT guys who deal with mail and messaging, RBS has a web site which doesn't know about IE7

The RBS site says "Please use a recent version of Internet Explorer" - which actually makes matters worse, visit  www.Microsoft.com/IE  and you end up at the IE7 page. I know people in RBS who have been looking at Vista since before the beta 2 release, and so the existence of IE version numbers higher than 6 is not news to them, yet a month after IE7 was released "recent" means IE6 to the web site (which in some people's eyes is the bank). I could get around this, but it's easier to take my business somewhere else. I did try Natwest as they are owned by RBS but I got the same thing. As Natwest's Ads might say my browser: rejected, my account switched.

In case you think this is having go at RBS, it isn't really. It's a lesson in how not keeping your site up to date costs you business. Make sure it doesn't happen to you.

Update. I had a mail this evening from someone who I assume is connected with RBS : the site now accepts IE7. I've got their competitors card.