Banks should let customers input amounts as displayed

An older lady of my acquaintance recently had to drive 20km to visit the branch of a well-known South African bank in order to make a transfer to another account at the same bank even though she uses Internet banking. It was a somewhat larger amount than usual and her mistake was using the comma as thousands' separator. Why? Since that was how the bank also displayed numbers on the same page. Very recently, I had the same problem at another bank. If you include a space in the amount, it is rejected even though the bank displays the space itself, right at the next step. Now, since we officially use the comma as decimal symbol one can understand a reluctance to allow it as a thousands' separator when using the decimal point as most banking applications do. Why the space is forbidden, I do not know as it clearly makes the number more reasonably and a few lines of JavaScript can remove it when the transaction is submitted. The same is true for telephone numbers. User Experience: fail.