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PayPal Launches Micropayment Pricing

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 31, 2005
Categories: Epayments, PayPal

The so-called micropayments market has been one of the most hyped non-issues of the Internet era. First, it’s not a monumental problem; there are many workarounds available, such as ACH processing, monthly billing, and so on. Second, the market, by definition, is not huge. Even a billion 99-cent downloads generates just $100 million in interchange revenue at PayPal’s new prices (see below).

Nevertheless, it’s good to see solutions evolve. Today’s PayPal announcement should help continue that natural progression. Ebay’s online payment arm announced that it wil provide a micropayment option priced at 5 cents per transaction plus 5% of the transaction amount. That means a dime in interchage for a 99-cent song compared to closer to $0.25 to $0.30 under industry standard pricing today.

It won’t change the world, but as they say, every penny counts.

—JB

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Marketing Bank Accounts to Students

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 29, 2005
Categories: Advertising & Promotion

Although the profitability is marginal due to low balances and frequent transactions, we subscribe to the conventional wisdom that it is worth going after college student accounts for three reasons (in order of importance):

1. Cross-selling to the parents
2. Student loans and other credit products
3. Future business from the graduate

While your branches may want to use point-of-sale material targeted student traffic, online promotions should be pitched at parents who will likely make the banking decisions for incoming freshman.

To test our theories, we took a spin around the web to see assess the state of back-to-school bank marketing. Here’s the good, bad, and ugly of what we found.

Top 25 Banks
We took a look at the 25 largest U.S. retail banks, and surprisingly only Bank of America had a prominent promotion. Wells Fargo had a small banner running for student loans and Key Bank and M&T Bank each had text links to a student banking offer. The other 21, showed no special student banking copy or graphics on their homepages.

1. Bank of America www.bankamerica.com

Bank of America’s homepage (see inset), devotes most of its promotional real estate to a student banking promotion. The picture grabs your attention and the Learn More links drops visitors onto a landing page that does a good job selling the account benefits.

Grade: A

2. Wells Fargo www.wellsfargo.com

Wells Fargo doesn’t put near the emphasis on student banking as does Bank America. Instead, the bank uses one of its two small banners in the lower right to sell student loans (see inset). However, the banner is rotated with several other promotions, so it’s not always visible.

The graphic image isn’t particularly attractive, but the copy, Which Student Loan is Right for You? and Use our loan selector are good draws. However, upon clicking, users are forced into a selector tool with no option for general information first.

Grades:
B+ for the promotional graphics
C- for the landing page

3. Key Bank www.keybank.com

Key Bank uses its Highlights box in the lower right to promote student checking (click on inset for closeup). With many users trained to ignore banners, this is an excellent way to gain attention. After clicking through, the landing page does a good job of selling account benefits, although the initial headline about its ATM rebates, Get up to $6* back each month, strikes us as a confusing way to start things off. It would be more effective to highlight the key benefit, FREE, right at the outset.

Grades:
A for the homepage promotion
A- for the landing page

4. M & T Bank www.mandtbank.com

M&T’s approach is similar to Key Bank’s, a text link on the right of the homepage (see inset). It’s not quite as effective because the copy just floats on the page, there is no box to draw the eye to it. But with a relatively sparse homepage, the promotion should get noticed. The promised bonus should also improve click-throughs. However, the landing page needs to be reworked. Not only is there no mention of the promised free gift, there are too many navigational choices and no clear path for the user.

Grades:
B for homepage promotion
C for landing page

Outside the Top 25
Since we weren’t overly inspired by what we saw at the big banks, we decided to dig deeper in search of the ultimate back-to-school offer. Here’s what we found:

1. Tennessee State Bank www.tnstatebank.com

After a Google or two we ended up at Tennessee State Bank, a $480-million asset bank headquartered in Pigeon Forge, TN. The bank’s homepage (click on inset) is dominated by a back-to-school promotion with a picture of its checkbook cover in the foreground with textbooks, a tennis ball, and maybe an adding machine in the background.

Not a great photo, but acceptable.

However, the copy is terrible.

Textbooks, Folders, Pens, Pencils,

Floppy Disks and…

a FREE CHECKING account from

Tennessee State Bank!

The free checking will get the attention of parents, but folders and floppy disks? That’s so 1990s. How about laptops, cell phones, or DVD players? Better yet, remember the medium. How about instant online transfers, free online banking, and 24/7 online service?

One final note: There is no hyperlink with the promotion. Neither the headline, photo or copy are clickable to another area to signup or even learn more.

Grades:
A for timeliness
D for execution

Update 9/1/05:

National City added a small banner on the right promoting free student checking accounts.
Citizens Bank (Royal Bank) is running a medium-sized banner in the lower portion of its homepage for student loans

—JB

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HSBC Joins the U.S. High-Rate Savings Account Race

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 26, 2005
Categories: Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs, HSBC

HSBC’s U.S. unit launched a 3.50% APY savings account that competes directly with ING Direct (currently 3.30%) and other high-rate financial institutions. The rate is featured in an eye-catching red box smack dab in the middle of HSBC’s homepage (click on inset for a close-up).

For more information on high-rate savings products, select Checking & Deposit Accounts from the navigation in the right-column of this newsletter. Also, read our latest Online Banking Report devoted to the subject, Lessons from the High-Rate Marketers (OBR 120/121).

Update 9/1/05:
The rate was raised to 3.75% today vs. 3.30% at ING Direct

—JB

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Citibank’s Security Pop-Up

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 23, 2005
Categories: Citibank, Security & Privacy

Under the "every little bit helps" theory, Citibank’s popup window when registering for online credit card access is a nice touch.

The popup (click on inset for closer view) reassures users that they are entering information into a secure site. The well-crafted verse goes like this:

Secure.
A little word that that means a lot–especially online.
Rest assured, this registration process is just that.

The window closes itself in about 10 seconds, if the user hasn’t done so already.

—JB

To learn more about how to promote online security and peace of mind, check out Marketing Security: The sensitive issue of publicizing security and authorization enhancements from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

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Netbank Wallflowers Concert Promotion

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 18, 2005
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs, NetBank

Maybe I’m biased as a fan, but I think Netbank’s Concert Connection, sponsoring a free Wallflowers concert, is a great stunt. Especially if the bank can leverage it to gain exposure in more than just the Austin market.

Here’s the offer (click on inset below to see landing page): Customer’s who plunk down $500 into a new checking account, or $1500 into a CD or Money Market, get two free tickets to a private Wallflowers show in Austin, TX on Sept. 17. The money must be kept on deposit for at least 90 days or the bank will deduct $85 to cover the tickets.

The bank’s press release says it will be promoting the offer with a mobile vehicle along with billboards, print and radio ads. The concert venue holds 5,000, so Netbank can use the offer to attract a maximum of 2500 new accounts.

Analysis
This is an expensive promotion for a single market, with the concert alone cost an estimated $100,000 or more, not to mention the cost of promoting it in the Austin market. It might make more sense to sponsor an entire Wallflowers tour, providing tickets to new Netbank customers around the country. That would be even more costly, but would guarantee broad exposure to the offer.

Yet, we still like the Austin promotion for several reasons:
1. Free publicity: There’s nothing like a free event to garner media exposure.
2. Lasting brand impression: Unlike other media campaigns, this event should provide a more lasting brand impression, especially with the 25-35 crowd attracted to this music.
3. Dylan connection: The Wallflowers, led by lead singer Jakob Dylan, son of rock legend Bob Dylan, is an especially good choice for this promotion. Along with its younger fan base, the band will also attract attention from an older crowd that might drop $1500 into a CD to see if Jakob can carry on dad’s legacy.
4. Concert tie-ins: Even though the event is primarily oriented to Austin-area consumers, it will pull in business from Wallflowers fans all over Texas. But to reach beyond Texas, Netbank should consider negotiating rights to offer the concert as a free download for all its customers. Other tie-ins with merchandise, fan clubs, and so on are also possible.

The downsides:
1. Demographic mis-match: Alt-rock fans aren’t usually old enough or wealthy enough to be parking big cash piles in a bank. Many will deposit the bare minimum and pull it out after 90 days or when their CD matures.
2. High acquisition cost: As you can see by the mini-business case below, the acquisition costs are hefty. Assuming Netbank ends up with 500 new accounts that remain open after the 90-day minimum, the cost per new account is $2000 or more.
3. Extra customer service load: The first law of marketing applies here: for every customer delighted with your offer, another is mad because they missed out on it for some reason. We can already see brewing discontent on the Wallflowers bulletin board from rabid fans that don’t have the extra cash to plunk down into Netbank to earn the tickets (we have one word of advice for them: eBay). Also, there can always be headaches when third parties are involved. As we were researching this article, we noticed that the ticket fulfillment site, Tickets.com, was not functioning properly. We were able to download two Wallflower tickets without fulfilling the offer requirements. We notified Netbank right away who will likely have it fixed within hours. Now if we could only find a business reason to be in Austin on Sept. 17….

Back-of-the-envelope business case:
Cost = $150,000
$100,000 for the concert + $50,0000 out of pocket promotional expenses (assumes radio exposure is bartered for with free tickets)

Accounts generated initially: 1500 x $2000 average deposit = $3 million in deposits worth $30,000 to $60,000 per year assuming a 1% to 2% spread (will depend on deposit mix)

Long-term accounts generated: 750 assuming a 50% fallout after the first year

Acquisition cost: $150,000/750 = $2000 per long-term account

—JB

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Everbank’s MarketSafe CD

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 16, 2005
Categories: Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs, Everbank, Investment Products

When I was a deposit product manager in the late 1980s, I worked on a project to bring out an equity indexed certificate of deposit. That project died, one more merger casualty, but I've always been intrigued by the product.

Over the years, a number of banks have offered market-indexed CDs, but they've never been much more than a niche product. That's OK. More than half of Amazon's book sales are from titles not found at retail bookstores. The Internet is a great place to mine the niches. Everbank has already proved that by moving nearly $1 billion worth of foreign currency-denominated deposits.

Analysis
The problem with equity indexed CDs is that they are crummy investments. By the time you pay for the hedging, marketing, and bank overhead, there's not much left over to pay the investor.

Let's look at Everbank's latest incarnation. The MarketSafe CD provides a total return based on a relatively complicated formula that averages S&P 500 prices at six-month intervals during the five-year term. In an up market, the CDs typically return 40% to 60% of the S%P gain (click on inset below).

The main selling point: Investors are guaranteed a minimum 5% total return over the five years (APY = 0.98%). The CDs are FDIC insured up to $100,000 with a minimum investment of $1500.

By Everbank's own figures (click on inset), its CD would have only beaten the S&P 500 index eight times during the previous 31 five-year periods beginning with 1970-1975. And by our estimates, the return would have beaten a normal 5-year CD more than half the time, 17 out of 31 periods. But only twice did the MarketSafe CD beat both the S&P and a regular CD.

Expected returns would be higher if the investor simply bought a mix of regular CDs and S&P indexed funds. The most conservative would be an 82% CD, 18% S&P mix that would still return all principal even if the S&P went to zero (assuming 4% CD APY). For the less conservative, a 67% CD, 33% S&P split would still return the principal even if the S&P dropped 40%. You get the idea.

But the target market for MarketSafe CDs is probably someone that never invests in equities. For that person, the MarketSafe is a reasonable way to put a little money "in the market." From Everbank's perspective, it's a nice addition to their unique deposit product line.

Addendum: View full screenshot of MarketSafe CD page

—JB

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What Not To Do: Verity’s 10% APY Come-On

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 11, 2005
Categories: Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs, Verity CU

Normally, we don’t pay much attention to radio ads, usually pressing the Seek button as soon as one comes on. But today, a particular ad caught our attention. It was for a 10% APY CD offered by Seattle-based Verity Credit Union (see inset) which accepts any resident of Washington state as a member. The term was 10-months and the maximum deposit was $1000.

While we admit this rate did get our attention, we don’t like this tactic for several reasons:

1. Bait-and-switch: Sophisticated depositors know it’s a teaser rate; and they will only leave their money on deposit long-enough to grab the $83 interest check. However, it’s the less-sophisticated that actually think this might be a real rate, that get sucked in only to be deeply disappointed once rates ratchet back to the standard 3.25% rate.

2. Too expensive: Depositors receive $83 in interest instead of $27, a before-tax difference of $56. We think the credit union would be better off providing a straight $50 incentive for new deposits of $5000+ and/or $25 for $1000+. Not only is this a lower cost for the financial institution, it’s more straight-forward for the customer, and could bring in a higher average balance.

3. Too exclusive: Only applies to new members or existing members that convince a non-member to open one of the CDs. Blasting an offer across the airwaves and homepage that applies to new customers only is a sure way to disappoint existing members. Furthermore, the website has no explanation of how to refer a customer or how to take advantage of the referral bonus. As a matter of fact, the website has no more information about the special other than what’s shown in the homepage graphic (see inset above). The graphic image is NOT clickable.

4. Cannot apply online: Maybe we’re biased, but we strongly believe that red-hot products advertised on the radio and on the middle of the homepage, should have an online application. Verity’s promotion directs interested parties to its branches or call center.

—JB

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KeyCorp Enters High-Rate Deposit Game

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 10, 2005
Categories: Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs

As we gave a cursory glance to the BankRate.com deposit rate table in today’s Wall Street Journal, we were surprised to see KeyDirect listed at the top of the Money Market and Savings Account section with a 3.66% APY and a $50 minimum deposit.

We were even more surprised to find that KeyDirect is not a small bank in the middle of Idaho, but a little-known division of KeyCorp, the $91 billion bank headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. Key may be the first mainstream player to try to compete with the online-oriented direct banks such as ING DIrect, E*Trade Bank, and others. (See previous article.)

The success of Emigrant Direct, which said Monday that it has attracted more than 100,000 accounts with offers pasted all over BankRate.com, may encourage other traditional banks to test direct banking tactics. The New York-based bank said that the 100,000 accounts have an average balance of more than $30,000, meaning the bank has bagged more than $3 billion in deposits.

The next Online Banking Report (#120/121) will look at deposit gathering with a special emphasis in the high-rate game.

— JB

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Online Banking Confidence Still at 60%

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 9, 2005
Categories: Metrics & Market Research, Security & Privacy

The problem with most published information on consumer attitudes is that they don’t show the trend. It’s interesting to see that a certain portion of the population expresses concern about ecommerce security, but it’s not really actionable unless you see it in context. That way you know if the concern is growing, stable, or lessening. Or if consumers are more concerned about branch lobby security, telephone, or mail security.

Kudos to Informa Research for publishing a table showing consumer attitudes on online banking security dating back to 2000. As you might expect, consumers are significantly more confident than they were five years ago (59% vs. 49%), but there has also been a substantial drop-off since 2003 (59% vs. 70%).

Percent of consumers that Completely or Strongly Agree with the following statement:
Internet-based transactions handled by financial institutions are safe and secure

2000 49%
2001 56%
2003 70%
2005 59%
———–_
Source: Informa Research, Aug. 2005, n = 1690

Analysis
Taking a cup-is-half full approach, we are pleased to see that the majority of consumers still consider online banking to be safe. Although the drop-off from 2003 is a concern, we’ve probably hit bottom, barring any dramatic breeches in the near future. As banks institute security upgrades such as multi-factor authentication, broader security alerts, and secure messaging, consumer confidence will grow.

—JB

If you’d like to learn more about the future of online banking, check out the Online Banking & Bill Pay Forecast: Current, future and historical usage: 1994 to 2016 from our sister publication, The Online Banking Report.

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Is Zopa the Next Big Thing in Online Lending?

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 3, 2005
Categories: Loans & Credit, Zopa

The Internet has changed a lot of things in the past 10 years, but banking isn’t one of them. Sure, it’s now much easier to check your balance or see who you wrote check #1127 to. But these are incremental improvements. Nothing like what online brokerages did for trading stocks, or eBay for selling junk.

Thanks to government guarantees, and consumer cautiousness with their money, it’s a bit hard to disintermediate the banking system. Or is it?

Take a look at UK’s Zopa, a recently-launched online loan exchange built by execs from Internet-only bank Egg. Zopa matches lenders and borrowers, cutting out the middlemen (actually inserting themselves in the middle instead of a bank), potentially creating a more transparent and less expensive system (Zopa takes a 1% loan fee).

Like the U.S. mortgage system, risk is spread around by splitting each loan into 50 or more pieces that are pooled and repackaged into loans that are placed with individual investors (i.e. lenders). The borrowers and lenders remain anonymous to each other.

Funding from Benchmark Capital and Wellington Partners is further insurance that the company will be taken seriously.

Analysis
Is this a disruptive banking technology? Maybe. Variations on this theme, such as Circle Lending, are in existence. But there hasn’t been an effort as well funded and stocked with talent as Zopa. If anyone can pull this off, it’s the Egg folks. The Zopa website is fresh and irreverent, taking on banks at every step of the way (click on inset above).

Banks are easy targets, but to make this work, it’s going to take an extremely user-friendly system, some fantastic marketing, and a little luck. One of the big problems any startup lender faces is adverse selection. In other words, too many borrowers will be on the verge of a sharp decline in their creditworthiness; a decline not yet reflected in the credit score used to screen borrowers and price their loan.

The only real cure for that is perfect underwriting and lots of volume, that’s why preapproved credit card direct mail has worked so well for several decades.

The company hopes to take the concept to the United States later this year. Given the speed of our regulatory approval process, that seems unlikely. Look for it in late 2006 or early 2007, if the UK version begins to gain traction.

We’ll take a look at the concept in much more detail in an upcoming Online Banking Report.

—JB

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Setting Flags in Electronic Bank Alerts

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 1, 2005
Categories: Alerts & Messaging, Email Marketing

Now that consumers are beginning to receive multiple alerts and other email messages from their financial providers, you risk the problem of "alert fatigue." It happens with any warning system. If you get too many warnings or status messages, you start to ignore them, rendering the system ineffective.

One way to make your message standout is to add a "high importance" flag to your outgoing message. In Outlook and Outlook Express, a small red exclamation point will show on the subject line in the message list (click on the inset for a larger image). In this example, the Washington State Department of Revenue added the flag when it sent password-changed alert. But it didn’t add the flag when sending a routine payment confirmation.

The key to making the flag effective is to not overuse it. Don’t ever put it on an advertising or marketing message. And use great restraint when attaching it to balance or confirmation messages. It’s best use, might be for security-related notices such as password resets and other sporadic and relatively unusual activity.

—JB

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Weird Offline Bank Promotions

By Jim Bruene Posted on July 28, 2005
Categories: Advertising & Promotion

The title of this article Weird Offline Promotions, is not meant to be a negative. Weird marketing can be effective if it helps people remember your product in a positive light.

For online banking, it can be difficult to create offline promotions that drive people to your website. ING Direct is one company that has pulled it off. Both with their offline cafes in four U.S. cities and their innovative promotions blitzes when they kick off a city-wide awareness campaign. For example, in Washington D.C. they showed up one day at the Metro subway and paid for everyone’s morning commute. It was expensive, but the publicity was enormous.

New Ideas

Here’s one we’d never thought of, free parking for your clients. Apparently Lexus dealers in Georgia and southern Florida have pooled their money and arranged for the first 200 Lexus drivers to get preferred parking at Atlanta’s Turner Field and Sunrise, Florida’s Office Depot Center. Drivers still pay the going rate, but get the best spots. (Reference: BusinessWeek, July 18, 2005, p. 16). It may make more sense for a car dealer than an online bank, but you could tie it in to your auto lending program or some other VIP program.
Another auto-related effort that’s been going on for several years is HSBC’s Bank Cab promotion in New York City (click on thumbnail below to see an archived copy of the HSBC Bank Cab website from May 2004). In 2003 and 2004 the bank sponsored several promotions that included two distinct red-and-white Checker cabs that roamed NYC providing free rides to HSBC customers who could present a current HSBC ATM card. Again, there isn’t a direct correlation to online banking, but your ad agency could probably think of some good ideas along the lines of convenience (easy banking, easy rides) or free rides (free rides, free online bill pay), and so on.

We’ll continue this discussion in future articles.

—JB

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