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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/financialservices/0,3800010322,39167968,00.htm

Online banking needs serious help
Opinion: Declarations of arriving in the digital age appear to be hot air

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Monday 30 July 2007

Although many customers choose banks based on good service, most financial institutions still have poor websites. Julian Goldsmith asks: What gives?

Why are personal banking websites so bad?

Recently, as a result of a suspected account hijack, I was forced to try to make a credit card payment through my bank's (one of the big three) website, rather than over the phone.

Armed with the requisite account and access numbers, I started to log in. This took two separate pages for some reason. Once in, I had to negotiate a navigation system that would have frustrated Magellan and Cooke working together with a GPS plotter.

It took me a number of attempts just to move my own money into a credit card run by my own bank. The use of terms undecipherable to anyone without a charter in accountancy and the absence of the option to 'Pay your credit card bill, like you do about this time every month' in the small range of choices made me lose the will to live.

Current website design isn't perfect but it has clearly moved on since the last time this particular bank gave it any thought.

My bank must have more detailed information about me than any other organisation I deal with but it seems not to want to make use of it for its online banking arm. Strange, when considering the global banking world is desperate to improve customer relationships, that my bank's personal banking website doesn't appear to have changed in the last ten years.

Website navigation needs to be improved, so that customers spend the least time possible administering their own money, giving them more time to spend it. Banks need one view of their customer, so the details available to the contact centre are also used by the online channel.

Cheat Sheets

♦ Basel II
♦ MiFID
♦ Sarbanes-Oxley

In a recent survey customer service was rated the highest in importance when individuals chose a bank. High street banks seem to be ignoring this simple and obvious metric.

In the same survey, it was generally the smaller high street banks that scored the best in customer satisfaction. For smaller, read more nimble and better able to listen to the concerns of their customers.

The only consolation I have gained from my encounter with online banking is, if it's this difficult for me to get at my money, then it should be at least as hard for anyone trying to defraud me.