Key Bank Runs Timely "Pick Your President" Promotion

imageOverall, most major financial institutions do a good job with website design. But one thing usually lacking is timely tie-ins with events and holidays. Google is famous for doctoring its logo dozens of times each year to coincide with the national holidays and other big events. For example, for today’s big presidential election, the logo has been changed into a voting booth.

Those efforts, while not always directly driving new business, keep the website fresh and show that the bank is paying attention to the events that impact users day to day. And the best ones can increase sales. By leveraging well-hyped events such as the Olympics or Super Bowl, financial institutions can gain valuable PR and attention from customers.

image I looked at 3 or 4 dozen large U.S. bank and credit union sites today and found just one riding the election hysteria to make a point. Key Bank’s Pick Your President promotion (here) has nothing to do with McCain vs. Obama but is actually a clever way to convince customers to switch to electronic statements. Customers get $1 (George Washington) for every account switched to estatements and $5 (Abe Lincoln) if they take bill pay with that. The bank is also throwing in a pair of $1,000 sweeps prizes to add a few Benjamins to the mix.

Nice job, Key; our vote is with you.

Key Bank homepage with small banner for the Pick Your President promo
(4 Nov 2008)

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Key Bank Pick Your President landing page (4 Nov 2008)

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PNC Mobile Banking Offered through Verizon’s Website

Verizon Wireless mobile phone users can now download PNC Bank mobile banking directly from the Verizon Wireless site (here). The free service, powered by mFoundry, is housed in the Features & Downloads area (see first screenshot below).

However, unlike Firethorn's mobile banking app which carries a "recommended" endorsement from the wireless carrier (see second screenshot), the PNC Bank app is found only via site search (see last screenshot). The PNC app is currently not available via browsing the business apps.

Users may click on the Send to Phone button, a shortcut that sends an application directly to their mobile phone for easy downloading. Both mobile banking applications are free.

PNC Mobile Banking app on Verizon Wireless site (3 Nov 2008)

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Search results for "banking" at Verizon's Tools & Applications area
(3 Nov 2008)

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Firethorn's mobile banking app is recommended at the Verizon site
(3 Nov 2008)

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Note:
1. For more information on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking.

ING Direct Delivers a Small Online Banking Treat with Halloween Homepage Animation

image I’ve written about ING Direct’s holiday animations before. While they won’t win any new business by themselves, they are part of a brand image that ING Direct cultivates. And it works because many consumers respond positively to a sense of humor even from institutions that are supposed to be serious.

With consumer confidence at an all-time low, and banks not exactly on anyone’s holiday-card list, it’s probably not a good time to create a whimsical branding campaign. But if you are ING Direct, which has built its image on bright-orange graphics and hip advertising, you can still have a little fun with the bank’s favorite orange holiday, Halloween.

Visitors to the direct bank’s homepage this week initially see white space where the bouncing orange ball normally does its thing. Within a few seconds an orange-eyed ghost comes out of the background (see first screenshot below). It comes towards you, then reveals the orange ball underneath the white “costume” (see second screenshot). Then it ends with the usual homepage (see third screenshot; note 1).

Very clever (I’d even say LOL, but I’ve vowed to never to use that term professionally).

ING Direct homepage (28 Oct. 2008)

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Notes:
1. The animation runs just once. That’s an important element of restraint to preserve the viewing experience. Don’t endlessly cycle animations or you’ll annoy your visitors. They can refresh themselves if they want to see it again. 

ING Direct Launches "We, the Savers" Manifesto & Microsite

imageI noticed a new graphic on the ING Direct homepage today, “We, the Savers” in the upper-right corner. It leads to a banking version of the Clue Train Manifesto called The Declaration of Financial Independence operated by the bank at <wethesavers.com>.

imageAt the microsite visitors can read the 10-point declaration and sign the manifesto online. The U.S. map includes orange balls in each state that when moused over reveal the number of signers. So far, more than 5,300 consumers have signed since it went live Oct. 10th. All signers can be viewed at the site, but you have the option of leaving only your last initial for privacy.

When you sign the declaration, a little orange ball bounces over to the map and updates the state count in real time. As a final touch, signers qualify for a free “I save” bumper sticker from the bank’s online store.

The effort is well conceived and well executed, as we’ve come to expect from ING Direct.

Wethesavers.com microsite from ING Direct (28 Oct 2008)

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“We, the Savers” link on ING Direct homepage (28 Oct 2008)

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Citibank Credit Cards Coming to the iPhone Nov. 1, Powered by Firethorn

image Firethorn (owned by Qualcomm) has a new iPhone app called Mobile Banking for AT&T Customers. The app is currently ranked number eight in the finance category of the Apple iTunes App Store (see screenshot below). Of the transactional services, only PayPal and BofA’s Mobile Banking are higher.

Firethorn iPhone app (27 Oct 2008) The application can be used to access online banking at any of the ten financial institution holding companies, and their subsidiaries, currently supported by Firethorn:

  • 1st Bank (Colorado)
  • America First Credit Union
  • Arvest
  • BancorpSouth
  • Caroline First
  • Mercantile Bank
  • Suntrust
  • Synovus
  • USAA
  • Wachovia (now owned by Wells Fargo)

The Firethorn application has 27 reviews so far and has scored a 4-star average (out of 5), much better than the typical finance app (see previous coverage here). The main complaint is lack of coverage for the user’s bank, which is not the fault of the app.  In comparison, Bank of America’s app garnered 434 reviews and a 2.5-star rating.

I downloaded the application today and, unfortunately, I don’t have an account at any of the financial institutions; however, that will change next week if they hit the dates contained in the Featured Providers page.

Here are coming-soon financial institutions:

  • Citi Cards (Citibank) “coming Nov. 1” (previous press release here)
  • Chase Bank “coming soon”
  • Regions Bank “beginning this fall”

Firethorn Mobile Banking on AT&T in Apple iTunes App Store (27 Oct 2008)

E-Loan to Stop Direct Mortgage Lending but Will Maintain Loan Portal/Referral Business

image In the early commercial Web era (1995 to 1998), five financial startups inspired me in terms of their innovative products and services: 

  • E-Loan for mortgage
  • E*Trade for stock brokerage
  • Netbank for deposit-taking
  • NextCard for credit cards
  • LendingTree for lead generation

These were my go to companies for ideas and inspiration when covering the space in the mid-to-late 1990s. In those days, traditional financial institutions were just getting started and were not as far along in features and functionality. 

Sadly, two of the five have failed, NextCard in 2002 (here) and NetBank in 2007 (here). And the other three are struggling through the credit crisis.

The latest downer: This week, E-Loan, owned by Banco Popular, announced its exit from the online mortgage origination business. Reading the headlines, I first thought they’d thrown in the towel altogether. But it turns out they are discontinuing only direct mortgage originations. The company will continue to use its popular website (see traffic below) to attract potential borrowers who are handed off to other lenders, something it already does today for student, auto, personal and business loans, along with credit cards. This is a potentially lucrative fee-based business with zero credit risk.

It’s a cautionary tale of how critical, and difficult, the execution piece is. These were industry darlings, always in the news and at the top of the search results. Yet, in financial services especially, you have to temper innovation with prudent underwriting and business practices. All three were brought down by credit-related problems. 

E-Loan traffic has stabilized at around 250,000 uniques per month:

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Online Personal Finance Traffic More than Doubles; PNC Virtual Wallet Grabs Second Place

image As I was drilling into the latest Compete traffic numbers for the annual Online Banking Report planning issue, I noticed a significant uptick in traffic to online personal finance specialists, almost across the board.

Sept. traffic revealed a total of 1.2 million unique visitors (note 1) compared to less than 400,000 a year ago. Not surprisingly, consumers appear to be taking a closer look at their finances. 

The big three newcomers last year: Mint, Wesabe, and Geezeo saw combined traffic increase by 450,000 users, a nearly three-fold increase from 2007. Geezeo was the star percentage-wise, growing more than six-fold. But Mint accounted for three-fourths of the net gain across the existing players with 330,000 more visitors (see Table 1 below):

Also, two newcomers made a big splash last month:

  • PNC Virtual Wallet launched in July (coverage here) by PNC Bank, which trailed only Mint last month with nearly 140,000 unique visitors (see 2 below).
  • Rudder (a relaunch of Spendview) drew 50,000 visitors last month after its launch at DEMOfall in early Sept.

Granted, the PNC Virtual Wallet benefits enormously from the 2 million monthly visitors to parent PNC.com and PNCBank.com. Yet, it’s still an impressive total and is encouraging for banks and credit unions considering similar efforts.

Table 1: Online PFMs launched more than 1 year ago

  Sep 2008 Sep 2007 Gain ’08 vs. ’07 Multiple
Mint 530,000 200,000 330,000 2.7 x
Geezeo 72,000 11,000 61,000 6.5 x
Wesabe 89,000 33,000 56,000 2.7 x
Yodlee 97,000 50,000 47,000 1.9 x
Finicity/Mvelopes 91,000 73,000 18,000 1.2 x
Buxfer 9,000 3,500 5,500 2.5 x
PearBudget 6,300 2,100 4,200 3.0 x
ClearCheckbook 6,200 2,800 3,400 2.2 x
BudgetTracker 12,000 12,000 0 Flat
  Total 910,000 380,000 530,000 2.4x

Table 2: The online PFM class of 2008

  Sep 2008 Sep 2007 Gain
PNC Virtual Wallet 140,000 0 140,000
Rudder 50,000 2,000 (1) 48,000
Expensify 9,600 0 9,600
GreenSherpa 6,300 0 6,300
RateSurfer 4,400 0 4,400
Thrive 3,500 0 3,500
Expensr 2,900 0 2,900
Banzai 2,700 0 2,700
iThryv 2,000 0 2,000
  T
otal
220,000 2,000 220,000
       
Grand Total 1.2 million 380,000 750,000

 Notes:

1. Sum of the monthly unique visitors from all PFM companies, visitors that went to more than one PFM provider are not eliminated from the total, so there is double counting in the totals. Data source is Compete, pulled 21 Oct 2008.

2. Rudder was previously Spendview, but we consider them to be essentially a new company.

Google’s G1/Android Phone Launches Today; Bank of America Mobile Banking is First Finance App

Bank of America Google Android G1 menu with mobile banking app loaded (22 Oct 2008) A few hours ago, I talked to a friend who’d just purchased the T-Mobile G1 phone this morning in Atlanta. He was pleased with it so far and said he was impressed to see Bank of America available on day one through Googles Android Market.

Apparently, BofA was the only app in the Finance section this morning (see inset). However, that will change rapidly as the store opens to other developers next week. Thanks to Alan Martin for the screenshots.

The bank’s Android app looks like the other mobile versions. It includes online banking access and an ATM/branch locator that uses built-in, location-based services (see pictures below).

I also read several blog reports of successful downloads  of the BofA app. However, when visiting the Android market website, the BofA app is not shown amongst the 40-some programs currently available. Apparently, the public market website is different than the app market accessible through the phone. I guess I’ll have to hit the T-Mobile store tomorrow to see for myself.

Congratulations to BofA for again beating its U.S. competitors in mobile deployment. It now has a three-peat in recent smartphone application launches:

For more info on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking.

Bank of America Google Android App main menu (22 Oct 2008) Bank of America Google Android App online banking signin (22 Oct 2008)

Bank of America Google Android App branch locator (22 Oct 2008) image Bank of America Google Android G! App bank branch map (22 Oct 2008) Bank of America Google Android G1 App more info (22 Oct 2008)

Bank of America Google Android App bank services (22 Oct 2008)

P2P Lender Prosper Closes Marketplace to Lenders; Loanio Unaffected for Now

image I was packing up my hotel room after five great days in NYC putting on Finovate, when I got a call from a reporter who asked me if I’d “heard the news.” Since we’d been talking P2P lending earlier in the week, I figured his question was related to that. But I couldn’t imagine what news could compete with the launch of Loanio, the closing of Zopa (US), the delayed launch of Pertuity Direct, and the grand reopening of Lending Club. That was already a full year’s worth of major developments packed into a two-week period. 

So I about fell off the bed when he told me Prosper had closed off new lending until the completion of its SEC registration process, entering the same regulatory twilight zone from which Lending Club had just emerged the previous day. And this was only 14 hours after Chris Larsen had been quoted in an upbeat Prosper company blog entry about the role of his company during the credit crunch (note 1):

“At a time when every sector in the economy seems to be under pressure and shrinking, the growth Prosper has experienced is very respectable.”

Impact on Loanio
Because I’d just spent an hour with Loanio founder Michael Solomon the day before at our Finovate conference, I immediately wondered if he might be facing the same registration hurdle. But I reached him a few minutes ago via email and he’s thinking this probably benefits his new marketplace since lenders are frozen out of Prosper. He also doesn’t expect to enter into a similar registration process in the foreseeable future.

Here’s his full statement:

“…from the perspective of (Prosper) going silent, it is actually great for us as I think we will quickly gain lots of lenders and hopefully we can wow them into sticking around. From a regulatory standpoint, we believe that at some point we will seek to introduce a secondary market platform, but we will focus the greater part of the next 12 months on building our platform and seeking out a national bank partner to cover the rest of the U.S. Our plans for a secondary market are too far ahead for me to contemplate at this time.”

Thoughts
Regulators certainly have a right to require transparency in the marketplace and protection for consumers. But Prosper, with an open API of its transactions, balances and even repayment behavior, and which uses a completely market-driven, open-bidding process to set rates and select loans to fund, is about as open a business as you ever will see, especially in financial services.

For the sake of the nascent industry, I hope the registration is put on a fast track and Prosper is back in the game faster than the six months Lending Club waited. At this point, an alternative credit supply, albeit only $100+ million per year right now (note 2), sourced directly from willing individual investors and not from capital-constrained financial institutions, seems like something we should encourage.

Ultimately, Lending Club and now Prosper should benefit from improved liquidity that the secondary market allows. Since Prosper is not allowed to comment on the move, we can only speculate on what happened. But the timing of all this seems a bitter irony. Wasn’t a breakdown in the secondary markets a big part of what put us in such a bind now? 

According to its blog, Prosper will continue to make loans “through alternative sources (of funds)” (note 3). So perhaps the impact to the Prosper marketplace will be small. Especially if they are back in full swing by year-end or early 2009.

Notice on Prosper’s website announcing quiet period (isn’t that an oxymoron?) 16 Oct. 2008

Prosper quite period announcement 16 Oct 2008

Notes:
1. See today’s NY Times article for more info on this week’s developments. Don’t miss the picture of Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche standing outside the Finovate 2008 demo hall.

2. For more info on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Person-to-Person Lending

3. Presumably, to keep the loans flowing, Prosper can tap its own funds as well as those of institutional investors or other professional investors. We’ll know soon, thanks to its open API.

CheckFree, Credit Karma, Mint and MoneyAisle Win Finovate Best of Show Awards

image As conference host, I haven’t quite recovered from the whirlwind of activity yesterday. I’ll post a final conference wrapup tomorrow, but I wanted to get in a quick update with the Finovate 2008 Best of Show winners. 

We had planned to award it to the top three, but there were four companies in a virtual tie at the top (note 1), so we named four winners this year.

In alphabetic order, the winners:

  • image CheckFree which demonstrated its new online banking platform packed with new features
  • image Credit Karma which showed several new features including a tool allowing “what-if” calculations with your credit file
  • imageMint which announced its move out of beta and demo’d several new investment management functions
  • imageNeosaej which showed its unique MoneyAisle real-time, reverse-deposit auction service

Congratulations to these four companies and to everyone else who made the day so interesting.

About the voting
All attendees not affiliated with the presenters rated each demo on a scale of one to six. The ballots were turned in at the end of the final demo session. Approximately 70% of eligible voters turned in complete ballots.

Note:
The companies didn’t finish with the same average scores, but rounding to the nearest tenth created a four-way tie.

Finovate 2008 BillShrink

image Drum roll, please. Our final presenter today is Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink.

Menlo Park, CA-based BillShrink launched its new service in July.

The service is designed to help consumers find the best deal in various categories. Today they showed the credit card selector. The service provides detailed breakdowns of fees and rewards to allow consumers to compare across more than 200 cards in the market.

Launching today is MyAccounts which allows users to track their accounts more easily.

BillShrink also tracks wireless carriers and allows users to find the best mobile phone deals.  

BillShrink announced an $8 million dollar funding today.