The report shows that financial industry sites are focusing on the service side of the delivery channel, rather than the sales side. Sixty-two percent allow customers to apply for accounts online, up from only a handful in 1999. Last year, only one bank in our survey group offered online trading. For small businesses, financial institutions are beginning to offer real cash management functions through the Internet. While there has been a lot of progress in the design and usability of these sites, many are still surprisingly difficult to navigate.
Images are attractive and generally don t slow down the loading of a site too much.
But a potential customer has to spend too much time trying to discover what he can actually do online. Those that stand out as easy to use are Commerce Bank of New Jersey with a grid to help you select the product or service and Wells Fargo, with an excellent demo. Again this year, we were struck by the lack of sales information on the site. We were generally able to learn about the functions of the Internet banking applications, but we rarely learned about the benefits of using Internet banking. Here is the ideal opportunity to sell your service to an interested potential customer, but most banks fail.