Blog - Page 1181 of 1190

Virtual Open House for your Bank

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 10, 2005
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Website Usability & Design

How many times per month would you look at your bank’s website, other than online banking, if you didn’t work there?

Zero would be pretty close, I’d wager.

Case in point: I have far more interest than the average consumer, but I can count on one hand the times I’ve looked at my bank’s website during the past seven or eight years since its been online.

Sure I login most weeks, but my visit consists of finding the login button as soon as it loads, then moving into online banking to take care of my business. (Don’t tell my website usability collegues I said this, but it might be worth moving the login button around from time to time to "force" users become engaged with your homepage.)

Zero visits per month makes it tough to introduce new products, promotions, and features. Or to get customers to use self-service.

Action Item
To encourage visits, how about an old-fashioned Grande Re-opening or Open House celebration? Make it an annual event on the anniversery of your website launch. Publicize it with signs in the branch. Issue a press release. Drop a statement insert.

Decorate your homepage with balloons or something festive, and just like a real-world open house, offer virtual donuts (Krispy Kreme downloadable coupon), free coffee (Starbucks coupon), and door prizes after customer fills out an online entry form.

To encourage visitors to click further into your site, you could sprinkle freebies deeper in the site, or use an online scavenger hunt. And the great thing about this open house is there’s no cleaning up afterwards.

If you’d like to explore more about the interactive bank marketing ideas, check out the Interactive Financial Marketing Database from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

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HSBC Right-Sizes Website Fonts

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 9, 2005
Categories: HSBC

Do you get complaints that the copy on your website is too small?

First, make sure that you have not disabled the customer’s ability to control font size from their browser toolbar. This allows your savvier customers to easily change font sizes whenever necessary.

However, for the rest, who haven’t a clue that it’s even possible to change font size, consider adding a utility to your navigation menu that automates the process.

HSBC’s UK website features the above utility box on most interior pages, with the exception being the homepage. Not only can users easily increase/decrease text size (note the use of user-friendly language), they can also print the page or click through to the customer service contact center (itself a model of user-friendliness).

—JB

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Southwest’s Ding Marketing Direct to the Desktop

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 4, 2005
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Desktop Presence

Southwest Airlines, the cheeky U.S. discounter, has just launched a desktop alert system, aptly called Ding, that bypasses the entire spam-clogged email system and delivers alerts to the Windows system tray. It works much like WeatherBug, the popular weather application with more than 10 million users.

When a new fare becomes available, Southwest plays an audible tone and inserts an envelope over the Ding icon in the Windows system tray (see graphic right–click to enlarge). Users can click on the icon to launch the Southwest website and act on the special offer.

Analysis
You’d have to be a real Southwest frequent-flyer nut to want the airline dinging you with messages every day. But since most companies make 80% of their profits from 20% of their customers, this is probably a savvy move from the airline.

Certainly, Southwest knows what it’s doing. And since they do not sell tickets via other online travel services, they especially need this unique corridor to their best customers.

This approach could do wonders for a bank’s online delivery. Instead of trying to wind your way through your customer’s clogged in-box with alerts and marketing messages, drop an account balance alert onto their desktop every day. See Online Banking Report #85, Grabbing Desktop Mindshare, for more information on delivering financial services directly to the desktop.

—JB

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More Online Fraud Statistics from Gartner

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 3, 2005
Categories: Metrics & Market Research, Security & Privacy

Fraud-fighting vendors, Quova and Cyota hosted a webinar today featuring Avivah Litan, from Gartner.

A couple interesting Gartner stats that you can use in trying to gain additional resources to boost your authentication procedures:

Within 3 years (YE 2007), 60% to 75% of U.S. banks will use more than username/password at login. That’s up from zero today.
In the year prior to Gartner’s April 2004 consumer research, a projected 1.8 million consumers gave up their account info to phishers; this group was three times more likely to have been victimized by online fraud.

You should be able to view an archived version of the webinar at Quova within the next day or two.

—JB

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More on E*Trade’s Two-Factor Authentication Launch

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 2, 2005
Categories: E*Trade, Security & Privacy

Today’s American Banker (subscription required) reported that E*Trade will give security tokens to its high-roller customers, those that trade more than 5 times per month or who have more than $50,000 in their accounts.

As we reported in January, E*Trade has been testing the service with several hundred customers.

The quote of the day is from famed Gartner analyst, Avivah Litan:

However, banks face little risk from trying the technology, which has significant potential, she said. "If they get low adoption, they’re not spending very much money. If they get high adoption, they sell a lot more services. I could see people switching to E-Trade if they offer this type of security."

Analysis
The days of simple username and password access are numbered. Don’t be the last one on your block to install a security system, that’s a sure way to become the target of cybercriminals, and even worse, scathing press reports when customers are victimized.

—JB

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Quantifying Online Interbank Transfer Volumes

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 1, 2005
Categories: Epayments, MasterCard

We’ve been tracking the developments in account-to-account transfers closely, in preparation for an upcoming Online Banking Report on the subject. It’s tough to get a handle on the actual dollar volumes, so we were pleased to see American Banker’s Daniel Wolfe quantify the market size.

In Friday’s article (subscription required), MasterCard’s TowerGroup payments analyst, Beth Robertson is quoted as saying that in 2004, $730 billion was transferred via account-to-account transfer (i.e., a funds transfer from an individual’s account at one financial institution to the same customer’s account at another). That amounts to more than $7000 for each of approximately 100 million U.S. households. All but a billion or so was initiated off-line.

But the online portion is growing. CashEdge the leading supplier of online account-to-account transfers, expects to process $6 billion in 2005, that’s about $200 annually for each of the 30 million or so U.S. online banking households. However, fewer than 50% of those households have access to online account-to-account transfers.

—JB

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Phishing Vaccine for Email in UK

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 26, 2005
Categories: Security & Privacy

In the United Kingdom, the government has launched an initiative to inform its citizens of phishing and other fraud dangers. One of its key services is an email and/or text message service that informs users when new fraud threats are identified.

To fight the problem of having their own emails spoofed, they require users to select a "safe word" that will be used in the subject line of all emails.

Analysis
Not only is this an effective way to fight phishing, it helps personalize your messages, improving their chances of being read.

— JB

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Adding Sales Punch to Bank Homepages

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 23, 2005
Categories: Website Usability & Design

UK-based Alliance & Leicester doesn’t accept the premise that banking websites should be drab and colorless. Their orange-and-blue effort shouts "pay attention," perhaps a bit too loudly.

But there are more things to like in this homepage than there are to criticize.

Like

Prominent login on left side
Strong benefit statements in headlines, for example, 50 times more credit interest than other banks
Interactive loan calculator

Dislike

Too much animation competing for the eye, for example, four of the banners feature animation, three of which continue to endlessly cycle (if you use animation, make it stop after one or two cycles)
Overwhelming, where do you look first?
Everything looks like a come-on, where’s the content?

But whether one likes the design or not, the proof is in the results. And I bet the bank pulls in more new business from its home page than its more staid competitors.

However, a bit more restraint might make it work even better.

— JB

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“My Spending Report” from Wells Fargo

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 17, 2005
Categories: Epayments, Images & Online Archives, Personal Financial Management, Wells Fargo

2005 is off to an innovative start, first the launch of Billeo, a toolbar-based bill payment manager. Now, Wells Fargo puts a little sizzle into its online banking steak, with a preformatted spending report, ala Quicken, appropriately named, My Spending Report.

The bank's press release says its patent-pending, which we can only hope is a marketing gimmick.

Here's how the bank describes the service:

…combines spending transactions from a customer's check card, credit card, checking account and bill pay in one convenient place, accessed through a secured, online banking session and updated automatically each day. Electronic and bill payment transactions are organized by familiar categories such as gas/automotive, groceries, ATM withdrawals, etc.

Analysis
We will see more and more innovations around data delivery as banks try to differentiate their online services and add value. The stream of banking data available online is begging to be organized, analyzed, flagged, and reported.

Quicken has been doing it for 20 years, but it's more appealing to many users, especially younger ones, to integrate personal financial management right into banking websites.

Slightly Off-Topic Rant
Despite a well-crafted press release, don't bother visiting Wells Fargo's website today to learn more about My Spending Report. Not only is there no homepage link, the site-search function contains no relevant links either. So much for integrating PR with your website.

—JB

If you'd like to learn more about the how personal finance functionality is penetrating online banking, check out Personal Finance Features for Online Banking: Why “My Spending Report” trumps free bill pay on the subject from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

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Bill Payment Toolbar from Billeo

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 16, 2005
Categories: Best of the Web, Bill payment, Billeo, Desktop Presence, Epayments

Just when you thought the banks were gaining an upper hand in the electronic bill payment battle, up pops a newcomer with a fresh approach. Take a moment to check out Billeo. An odd name, but so is iPod, and it seems to be working pretty well.

We haven’t used it yet, so these comments are preliminary, but "on paper" this company and its approach appear to be winners. (One caveat: the business model is unknown, and the privacy policy is a bit ambiguous when it comes to the issue of adware. We’ll keep you posted on what we find out.)

Billeo is a free toolbar-resident application that plays "virtual assistant," enabling more convenient and controlled direct bill payment at vendor sites. The toolbar also serves as an e-wallet simplifying online point-of-sale transactions.

Analysis
The toolbar contains several unique features, one of which is extremely impressive, the ability to save screen captures of transaction receipts. The application also includes payment reminders, a payment register, and a personal "bill payment" email address for users.

There are several familiar names associated with the startup. Nancy Langer, a former exec at Metavante, is the president. The advisory board includes Eric Dunn, formerly with Intuit, Shankar Srinivasan co-founder of Cyberbills, and Scott Loftesness of Glenbrook Partners.

We’ll dissect the new service in Part 2 of our upcoming Electronic Payments Report in Online Banking Report.

—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.

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Making Online Chat Pay for Financial Websites

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 14, 2005
Categories: Service, Website Usability & Design

After giving AOL for Broadband a try, we decided to switch back to our old $4.95/mo plan we’ve been on for the last 5 or 6 years. Since it wasn’t listed as a choice in the normal pricing plan area, we clicked on the "live chat" button.

Within in few seconds we were live with an AOL rep, and within another minute or two, the rep had us switched back to our old plan. It was a very satisfactory experience.

Action Items
During the chat process we noticed two things that financial institutions should consider adding to their live chat functions:

1. Copy/print button in the lower-right allows users to print or save a transcript of the chat session. A great tool for satisfying the finicky customer who wants a record of their customer service interactions.

2. End-of-the-session cross-sell: After fixing our problem, the chat session automatically presented us with an opportunity to purchase an ancillary service at a special discount. The offer was delivered both in text in the chat window and through a banner above the chat area (click on the screenshot above to see more detail). This could be an effective sales technique so long as it’s delivered in the spirit of helping the customer.

—JB

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Competitive Comparisons of Services (e.g. Mortgage Rates)

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 8, 2005
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, IndyMac, Service

There is one marketing technique that is much easier to do online than through other media — competitive comparisons.

In the old print world, you might be able to update your brochure or ad once or twice per year. Online you can do it in near-real-time.

We’ve long been a fan of IndyMac’s mortgage comparison, first writing about it in Online Banking Report #72 (June 2001). The mortgage lender shows the total mortgage cost at various major competitors, even daring to include examples where it’s not the lowest overall price.

These competitive price comparisons are great, and if you consistently have lower prices, then you should use this approach.

But what about companies that compete on service more than price? After all, most consumers aren’t going to choose a bank, simply to save a buck a month on fees.

Idea
If your service is markedly better than your competition, create a comparison chart showing your service standards and capabilities stacked up against the competition.

Even better, hire an independent researcher to document search times, wait times, response times, resolution times, and so on, and post them to your website on a frequent basis. Not only will this impress prospects, its excellent reinforcement to your current customers and employees that you are measurably better than the rest.

— JB

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