Rethinking
online banking to be about empowering customers should be the cornerstone of any bank's reinvention strategy, according to a study from Change Sciences.
Top performers like PNC's Virtual
Wallet (www.pncvirtualwallet.com), Ally, and Bank of America are on their way to doing it. The three have revamped their online banking to give customers greater financial control. Other sites
evaluated by the New York-based company in the 61-page report were PNC (non-Virtual Wallet, at www.pnc.com), BB&T, ING Direct, SunTrust, Citibank and Chase.
Personal financial management tools
are no longer a "nice-to-have" add-on to online banking. Instead, smart and spare PFM functionality is becoming a must-have core component of online banking. The report details how banks can transform
online banking from being statement and register-driven to being driven by a new understanding of customer goals.
advertisement
advertisement
The approach is building brand loyalty in ways unseen anywhere else, says Pamela
Pavliscak, a Change Sciences Partner. "On most bank sites today, users are greeted by the typical online banking user interface," she says. "You can search transactions and pay a bill, but there isn't
a lot of attention to providing features and functionality that are deliberately designed to help customers get control of their spending and saving."
The report documents user experience,
design, best practices for logging in, providing an overview of accounts, accessing account detail, finding specific transactions, making transfers, and paying a bill for the first time. It explores
new and improved ways that sites support user goals and how banks are adapting online banking platforms to different degrees of success.
According to the report, 33% of the sites fail to answer
at least one question that users have and 44% of sites have content problems that make information difficult to understand for some users. Further, 67% of sites have instances of navigation design
that pose challenges to some users.