Billeo’s Business Model is B2B

We finally had a chance to talk to Billeo founder and CEO, Raj Lalwani. First last Thursday, then a followup demo today.

I am happy to report the CEO is as impressive as the software.

And it turns out their business model is more B2B than B2C. Billeo will be custom-designing toolbars for banks, credit card issuers, other ecommerce players, such as retailers, travel booking sites, and yes, even billers. They hope to announce a HUGE customer win in the next few weeks. 

We think this application has great promise

We will dissect the company in the next issue of Online Banking Report (available online approximately April 12).

Previous articles can be found here.

JB

Everbank’s Foreign Currency Deposits

Everbank_logo_1Two-time Online Banking Report Best of Web winner, Everbank landed a flattering two-page spread in the April 2005 issue of Business 2.0.

The author, David Dent, is highly complementary of the bank’s innovative strategy of allowing deposits to be held in a variety of foreign currencies. Not only has it been lucrative for currency investors, it’s been a boon to the bank.

Everbank’s foreign-denominated deposits are closing in on US$1 billion. Specifically, at year-end 2004, foreign currency deposits accounted for $850 million, or 25% of the bank’s $3.5 billion in total deposits.

Analysis
This is a good example of how a small player can mine a niche using the national reach of the Internet. Look for other banks, both Internet-only, and traditional financial institutions to do the same in other areas, such as lending to small businesses, transaction accounts geared to traveling sales reps, impenetrable savings accounts for the security conscious, and so on. 

Resources: OBR Best of Web winners: 1995 to 2004

— JB

Online Banking Helper Bubbles

Ebay_bubble_helper_1Here’s a little technique we haven’t seen before, helper bubbles that popup to highlight new and/or underutilized features.

For example, in My eBay, this yellow bubble appeared on the screen pointing to a relatively new feature on the site, a drop-down box that allows the user to take various actions on items they are tracking.

Note: eBay allows you to turn off the bubble with a "Don’t show me this again" link.

Analysis
A great way to highlight important features of online banking.

JB

Affinity Banking Online from Blackwell

Bankblackwell_logoBankBlackwell, a new Internet-only bank targeting African-Americans, began it’s roll-out today, with its first press release announcing OTS approval. The bank hope to launch this summer, provided they raise sufficient capital and pass regulatory muster.

CEO James Mundy and CIO Bruce Narison briefed me on the bank last fall, and they have impressive plans. We’ll keep you posted as they lift the veil on their online banking platform.

Analysis
BankBlackwell is the latest of a string of Internet-oriented banks using affinity marketing techniques. The two most prolific are: National Interbank which runs a number of banks for professional membership organizations such as the American Medical Association and The Bancorp Bank which has private-labeled banks for 40 organizations.

Affinity marketing is a proven strategy in the financial services arena, enjoying great success during the past 15 in the credit card market. We think there’s a great future in affinity-based online banking. As consumers grow more confident of web-based financial entities, they will be more than happy to take a few moments to set up an account and transfer a few grand into a higher-yield situation.

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.

Update on Billeo Bill Payment Toolbar

Billeo_billboardSince our <a href="initial report on Billeo, we’ve been using the system to pay and view bills. It’s a new category of software we’ll call toolbar-ware.

The primary user interface is an toolbar located near the top of Internet Explorer. Many of the toolbar functions call-out web pages from the Billeo server, so as you use the program it ends up being a mix of website and toolbar functions. It’s actually a bit confusing for the new user.

Part of the reason it’s not as intuitive as the Google or eBay toolbar, is that the user must learn an entirely new approach to tracking their billing. Whereas, with eBay and Google, most toolbar users are already well-versed in the nuances of using those popular sites.

Billeo_adsWe’ve also discovered their business model, running Google-like ads that run on the right of the page as you use the program. Click on the screenshot above to see the entire page. See left for the advertising section only.

Currently the advertisers running on the Billeo Billboard are ING Direct, The Wall Street Journal, Quicken Loans, and Value Line. The advertisers all stayed the same during our testing.

Bottom line: It’s a great program, and we recommend banks consider developing a similar toolbar which also incorporates banking functions, or licensing this one from Billeo. We’ll be publishing a complete review of Billeo in OBR #116, published in mid-April.

For more information:

JB

Editor’s Note: Billeo was named "OBR Best of the Web" in the second part of its series on E-Payments (OBR 119) published in June 2005. 

eBay Personalized Email Marketing

Ebay has been on the forefront of fighting online fraud, introducing Account Guard on its toolbar in Feb. 2004 (see Online Banking Report, #105/106 and #85), as well as a number of safeguards into its service delivery over the years.

Ebay_personalilzed_email_4The auction giant recently elevated the personalization in its emails, incorporating name and eBay username, in an effort to help users recognize genuine messages.

    

View closeup of personalization

JB 

If you’d like to learn more about the future of financial email messaging, check out Email Marketing in Financial Services: Leveraging the Inbox from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

Charter One Bank Screws Up their Email Messaging

Charter_one_message I first wrote about the benefits of email alerts in the third issue of Online Banking Report nearly ten years ago (OBR 3, June 1995). Since then I’ve enjoyed watching the service unfold, and I’ve never met an alert I didn’t like — until this week.

An email messaging pioneer, Charter One Bank, with a suite of email/fax/voice alerts named OBR Best of the Web in 2003, laid an egg this week.

I’ve had an account there for years and have received seven or eight hundred daily mini-statements in that time. Surprisingly, those daily messages have remained absolutely the same. No advertising, no service messages, no cross-sales. Not even a holiday greeting.

Imagine my surprise when last week I received, in addition to my daily statement, a New Message Alert (click on screenshot above) that said in part:

On March 21 a new message was delivered to your Online Banking Message Center. Please click here to view this important message.

Surprisingly, it didn’t occur to me that this could be a phish (it wasn’t). I really was afraid something had gone terribly wrong with my account. I couldn’t remember my username or password and the "lost password" function returned an error message. So I had to wait until I was home where it was written down.

As I anxiously logged into my account, expecting the worst, I wondered how I would cover the check I’d just written off the account. The first thing I did was check my balance. Phew, it was what I expected, just enough to avoid monthly fees. Then I crossed my fingers and navigated to the secure message center where the all-important message waited.

Imagine my "customer experience" when I found that Charter One had sent me on this harrowing chase only to inform me that (click on screenshot below):

Effective April 10, 2005, Charter One Bank’s Online
Banking service will no longer process one-time or
recurring online transfers to or from a passbook
savings account.

Charter_one_message_center_1 Not only do I not have a passbook savings account, I have no other accounts beside checking, so I am ineligible to make any type of transfer on the system. What a terrible waste of my time.

Seven days later, I get yet another message insisting that I log back into the site for another "important message." This one wasn’t much better. The bank was alerting me to an upcoming bill payment service slowdown. Never mind that I had never sent a bill payment nor activated the service in more than two years of maintaining an account at Charter One.

Moral of the Story
As a consumer, after enduring two false alarms, I feel this way about the bank:

1. They do not know me as a customer.
2. They do not care if they waste my time.
3. They have no ability to send targeted email.
4. They lack a basic level of common sense.
5. They do not know how to communicate through email.

Analysis
It would have been so easy to keep this from happening. The bank could have done any of the following:
a) Sent these message only to users of the specific accounts/functions
b) Assuming their system doesn’t allow (A), they could have sent the entire message to my Internet email address so I didn’t have to login to see it
c) Not sent the message at all to my Internet email and simply posted the message within the online banking area

Takeaways
The email relationship with your customer is powerful, yet extremely fragile. A few irrelevant "important information" messages, especially if a website login is required to access the message, can kill the entire channel.

JB

Citibank’s Impressive Follow-up Sales Effort

Citi_free_ipodCitibank has woken my sick-in-bed wife the last two mornings, calling to remind me to submit my paperwork to fund the new checking account I established online two weeks ago.

She’s not so thrilled with the bank, but I’m impressed with its tenacity.

Here is the scorecard of bank followup efforts:

  • Email = 1 (about 2 weeks after application…almost missed it, thought it was a phish)
  • Mail = 1 (technically not a reminder, it was the sig card and new account kit)
  • Phone = 3 (first about 1 week after application, then number 2 and 3, about 2 weeks after application

It’s an impressive follow-up effort. I’ve applied for a number of accounts over the years and I can recall receiving only one telephone call, from Salem Five back in 1995, and that wasn’t even an application, just a sales lead. The last time I tried to start a checking account, with Washington Mutual, I never heard from them, not so much as a single email or letter thanking me for my application. As far as I know it’s still sitting in limbo on some backup tape.

Sorry for the delay Citibank, I really do want that iPod, so I will be sending my $2500 deposit ASAP.

Action Item
If a company with as much experience as Citibank has found it to be profitable to make follow-up phone calls on unfunded new accounts, you should consider doing it as well. However, you may have more luck than Citi does using email followups. Citibank’s brand in an email message is practically worthless these days after the pounding it’s received from phishers.

JB

Intuit’s RockYourRefund.com Makes Tax Prep (almost) Fun

Step 1: It’s tax time
Step 2: Then it’s play time

Intuit_rock_your_refundSo starts one of the most interesting financial services websites to come along in a long time. Leave it to Intuit to come up with a way to make submitting your tax return seem almost fun. It’s RockYourRefund.com website is basically a jazzed up portal into TurboTax for the Web, a service that’s been around for more than five years.

Analysis
Sometimes it seems futile trying to make boring financial services interesting. Well if Intuit can do it with tax prep, you can do it with your financial products.

Take a minute to look at it yourself, but the premise is you get a 10% coupon at Best Buy or up to $200 off a trip after you’ve completed your tax return online via the TurboTax website. Cost for the online service is $5.95 for federal plus $9.95 for state tax returns.

Action Item
This approach would work wonderfully with bill payment. Offer coupons and offers that users would receive after paying their bills. A benefit for saving time and money using your super-convenient epayment service. (For more information on how to build a killer bill payment service, see Online Banking Report #80, 81, 82, 86, and an update on the market in #115 published three days ago. )

JB

Improve Bank Website Usability with Popup Sales Assistance

National_interbank_popup_1 Even with popup blockers wreaking havoc with this marketing technique, it still makes sense to program a popup when users abandon an application or any other important sales page. It’s also possible to program a popup after the user lingers in one area for a certain amount of time.

The popup should ask if assistance is needed and provide at minimum a telephone number and email address. Here’s an example from National Interbank.

JB

“Security Freeze” is the New Buzzword in Bank Marketing

LockSecurity freeze is the latest buzzword in the world of privacy and online security. It was used today in the title of an article in The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Journal section, Freezing Out Identity Theft.

Here’s how it used in the first sentence of the article:

In an effort to combat the rapidly escalating outbreak of identity-theft crimes, a handful of states including California and Texas have passed legislation that allows consumers to put a "security freeze" on their credit history.

Action Item
Use this phrase in your marketing to reassure wary customers. For example,

  • "Once you report any fraud, phishing, or identity theft, we will put a security freeze on your bank accounts against any unauthorized withdrawals."
  • "If someone tries to guess your password, we’ll freeze your account against any more attempts."

And eventually as you develop more advanced security preferences, customers will have the ability to put their own selected security freezes or locks on their accounts. For example, users that always access from one computer, could lock-out any access attempts from other IP addresses (see Quova for tools in this area). Or the customer could lock their account against point-of-sale transactions in other states and countries.

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

Security Applications may jump-start Mobile Banking

With the ubiquity of personal computers in the United States, the text messaging market has been slower to develop here than abroad. And since most banking interactions can wait until you are comfortably situated in front of your home/work PC, mobile banking applications have not been a high priority.

However, there is a new application that may jump-start mobile phone banking initiatives. Security.

With public confidence in the security of online banking waning, telephones, especially cell phones equipped with text messaging, offer an excellent option for secure two-factor authentication.

Here’s how it works:
1. Log in to the bank the old-fashioned way with username and password
2. A few seconds later, a four-digit number is text-messaged to your cell phone, or voicemailed to your land-line phone
3. Enter the four digits and start transacting

Text messaging can also be used for alerts, reminders, and other services.

But are U.S. users ready for advanced mobile phone features? It turns out the answer is a resounding YES. Would you believe 100 million U.S. users tapped into advanced features during the past three months. That’s a 58% penetration of all 174 million mobile phone subscribers. And two-thirds of the 58% sent or received text messages (37% of all subscribers) .

This fresh market data is courtesy of M:Metrics, a new Seattle-based telecom researcher who based these estimates from usage data complied across 35,000 U.S. mobile phone subscribers.

Not surprisingly, younger users embraced text-messaging the strongest. The penetration rate was above 50% in both the 18-24 year-old (68%) and 25-34 (52%) groups. The lowest penetration was 14% in the over-65 group.

Here’s more details on the advanced usage and percent penetration across all 174 million mobile phone subscribers:

Used at least one service          100 mil  58%
  Sent or received text message     65 mil  37%
  Used mobile email                      24 mil  14%
  Accessed news/info via browser   22 mil  13%
  Downloaded ringtone                 22 mil  13%
  Received text-message alert        15 mil  8%
  Used instant messaging                15 mil  8%
  Sent photo message                     12 mil  7%
  Downloaded display graphic          11 mil  6%
  Downloaded mobile game              6 mil  3%

Source: M:Metrics, March 2005, n=35,381 for quarter ending 31 Jan 2005

Read the full release.

JB