It's used by almost all UK banks as well, sadly. One of my accounts (First Direct) has max length of only 8 characters.

That is criminally poor. The most likely point of failure in most bank accounts nowadays is not the bank, it's the online banking portal. 8 characters is stupidly poor for potentially complete access to your bank account.

I hope they insist you use one of those card readers too.

You just spell it in your mind going through all the letters and only press keys where asked.

I'm recently switched from a bank that uses regular passwords to a bank that uses partial passwords, and it took me a week or so to get used to this, and it is a little slower (takes me like 10 seconds instead of 1), but it's nothing significant.

You have made the assumption that everyone who uses strong passwords can remember them in their head :-)

10x worse is pretty bad, even though it is only 10 seconds total.