Further to my recent post on the subject, I have now found more information on the Barclays Corporate website:

To access Business Internet Banking you need four things present at the same time:

1. A PC or laptop with the software that runs the smart card reader installed
2. A smart card reader. This is a hardware device, attached to your PC that the smart card is inserted into
3. A smart card unique to each individual user. The card will become “locked” if an invalid PIN is entered in excess of a pre defined number of times
4. A PIN unique to each individual user.

Unfortunately the Software Requirements link, at the bottom of that page, states only that you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which I suspect is not the only software requirement!

The Barclays Personal On-line banking works with all the browsers, so if the same is true of the Corporate banking, then it is at least possible that I could install Firefox under Wine on Linux, providing only that I can get the smart card reader to work.

The difficulty would be if it needs Active-X support, which whilst theoretically supported under the latest versions of Wine, would make the proposition very much less likely to work.

I have looked into moving to Barclays on-line business banking, but apparently it requires a hardware card reader that only works on Windows and Mac. This is a major problem as we run Linux everywhere and only access Windows via RDP to a virtual server.

Currently we use Barclays BusinessMaster that is installed on a shared Windows server that we can access via RDP or ICA. Thus any user with a BusinessMaster login can update our bank, create payments etc (subject to authority levels of course!).

Our only option now seems to be to install a standalone Windows PC somewhere and physically have to visit it in order to do our business banking.

Welcome to 2011.