"UK banks' online sales efforts fall flat" - thoughts?

sdj25

There's a report over at Finextra that claims that none of the top six banks + building socities (Barclays, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, NatWest, Nationwide):

(none) provide site visitors with strong content and functionality for researching and applying for credit cards

Thoughts?

Astaroth

Always very dubious about these kinds of reports.... we have had companies similiar to Forrester Research come to us with their statements like this and then offer to walk us through the reports in full/ make suggestions on how it can be improved etc - typically for a sum no less than 5 figures long. The one that my boss did entertain (no idea why, think he did just to get them off the phone) had little content, couldnt replicate the errors they had found on our sites and pointed out one of our sister brands had better functionality when (seemingly unknown to them) all of our brands have the identical functionality but simply a different colour scheme.

Of cause the other question to ask is if these companies actually really want to have amazing websites - given that having them and maintaining them costs massives amounts of money. Many banks (and other market sectors too) have created their own seperate brands which are aimed either directly at the internet user (eg Egg/ First Direct) or at the mass-affluent market (eg Mint) which happen to also be the main users of online financial services and the news artical doesnt mention what the research says about Mints website compared to Natwests when both are owned by RBS.