Bank websites lift game in July

By Liz Tay on Aug 6, 2010 1:55 PM
Filed under Networking

Westpac continues to lead in monthly audit.

Web performance improvements at Citibank, Macquarie Bank and Rabobank have brought the average response time of Australian bank websites under two seconds for the first time.

Compuware this week released results of its third monthly banking website audit, indicating the online response times, availability and consistency of 14 major Australian banks in July.

Nine of the 14 banks achieved 100 percent availability, resulting in an average availability of 99.94 percent - up from the 99.75 percent average in Compuware's inaugural May 2010 audit.

Although its availability had only dropped 0.01 points to 99.73 percent, ING Direct had the lowest availability of July owing to improvements at the Commonwealth Bank, Citibank, RaboBank, ANZ Bank and the Bank of Queensland.

Westpac continued to lead across all categories, maintaining a 0.16 second response and improving its consistency (standard deviation of response times) from 0.10 to 0.076.

RaboBank, whose data centres are located in Europe, improved its response time most significantly from 16.54 seconds to 4.893 seconds.

According to Rafi Katanasho, Compuware's application performance management solutions director, this was due to a configuration change in its content delivery network (CDN).

"There was a misconfiguration in the CDN that was slowing down the website," he told iTnews, explaining that a functional CDN equipped RaboBank with a local cache so it could serve some information faster.

Other areas for improvement could be interactions with third-party advertisement, content providers or analytics systems, Katanasho suggested.

Overall, July's 1.987 second average response time was an improvement over June's result of 2.557 seconds, and May's average response time of 3.11 seconds.

"July was the first month in which the average Response Time Rating across all 14 banks was better than two seconds, thanks to continuing performance improvements by key banks," Katanasho said.

"That is good news for banking customers who, in general, get frustrated if it takes more than two seconds to get an online response."

Response Times (sec)		Availability (%)		Consistency (sec)
Site	Response	Site	Availability	Site	Consistency
Westpac	0.160	Westpac	100.00	Westpac	0.076
Macquarie Bank	0.572	Adelaide Bank	100.00	Macquarie Bank	0.132
Adelaide Bank	0.584	CitiBank	100.00	Bankwest	0.173
CitiBank	1.293	St George Bank	100.00	CitiBank	0.300
St George Bank	1.350	ANZ Bank	100.00	Commonwealth Bank	0.343
ING Direct	1.363	Bendigo Bank	100.00	ANZ Bank	0.359
Commonwealth Bank	1.401	NAB	100.00	ING Direct	0.365
ANZ Bank	1.594	Bankwest	100.00	St George Bank	0.442
Bendigo Bank	1.836	Rabobank	100.00	Adelaide Bank	0.451
NAB	1.956	Average	99.94	Bendigo Bank	0.546
Average	1.987	Macquarie Bank	99.86	Average	0.641
Bankwest	2.487	Commonwealth Bank	99.86	Bank of Queensland	1.170
Bank of Queensland	3.286	Bank of Queensland	99.86	HSBC	1.201
Rabobank	4.893	HSBC	99.86	NAB	1.547
HSBC	5.040	ING Direct	99.73	Rabobank	1.868

1 comment in this discussion

"Personally, I think almost ALL the banks have missed the most important bit about internet banking... how you log in. One should measure how convenient/inconvenient (including how long it takes) ..."

By Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

Tags

bank, cdn, rabobank, westpac, macquarie, commbank, nab, citibank, hsbc, anz, financeit

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Comments: 1

Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

Aug 7, 2010 8:44 AM

Personally, I think almost ALL the banks have missed the most important bit about internet banking... how you log in. One should measure how convenient/inconvenient (including how long it takes) from deciding to check an account on-line till you have that info.

St George (which is otherwise a fine bank - sorry division of a bank) has four questions to identify you to log in. Of the four fields, one is a password. Gimme a break! The banks ought look at NYtimes, Dropbox, Google etc. Instead of allocating bank-allocated identification fields, the smartest/best/easiest sites ask a single non-password identification field of the user's choosing. The best is "What is your main email address?" but allow people to put in something else, if they feel inclined (or share an email address with another). Because of the way email works, this field is almost guaranteed to be unique to an individual (unless they chose to share such info). With bank-allocated customer numbers etc, people MUST write that crap down, as it is not something they thought up. How stupid is that? Banks HATE people writing down log-in field contents, and go to all sorts of trouble writing contracts that make the customer responsible for all losses incurred by writing down log-in fields, yet the banks INSIST on the identification fields being chosen by them, rather than the customer. Has no bank executive ever thought outside the box? They ought allow customers to select their own ID field(s), and just insist on a single strong password - again entirely of the customer's choosing. And don't tell me that there is extra security in asking for multiple non-password ID fields, as for ATM use, you only need one item of ID (a card) and a simple password - usually a four digit PIN.

The fundamentals of encryption mean that you can ask for a hundred fields to be input, but it all still boils down to a unique identification and a strong password - ie ten simple passwords is no better than one strong password. And ALL security is defeated as soon as you make things so complicated that your clients write it down so they can remember.

And don't get me started on how hopeless the banks are for archival transaction information. On just one or two 2TB hard drives ($150ea) each bank could keep all customer's transaction data (just the fields they show you on a statement, not including the rest of the crap they keep for own use) for seven years. Yet none of the banks reasonably offers you seven years data. Some show as little as 90 days data - so you have to log in and manually download data every quarter, or you have gaps in your data that you need for tax. I could even live with that, IFF they offered a service to allow you to say "email me a CSV file every quarter" after you confirm "Yes, I know that my financial details could be compromised by sending it in plain text, but I'd prefer to have the data, rather than having you morons destroy it." Personally, my greater fear is loss of the data, than someone else taking an interest in my transactions to intercept my emails. And if I lose my laptop, a sticky-beak could see my emails, but they could also see the quarterly CSVs that I've downloaded anyway!

And because the banks worry about the transaction load on their precious databases (a trivial issue really), those that do have transaction data available for longer than 90 days have instead pulled the data out of the search/query transaction format and have kept the data only in 'statement format', where you have to read the PDFs of the last seven years (ie 7x12 = 84 PDFs) to find a transaction. Talk about using computers for an insane purpose for which they were not intended! You have figures that are normally queriable, loadable into a spreadsheet, able to manipulated, and INSTEAD you put them into an embedded text-into-image format that requires human eyes to scan, searching for the relevant data. Brilliant! The best solution would be to allow the SAME system to be used spanning the seven years of data, such as allowing a CSV to be downloaded of (up to) seven years data.

And if you have a debit balance on a credit card (ie no credit supplied by bank, but your money in there), you still cannot transfer that money to another of your accounts via internet banking. You have to attend at a branch and withdraw the cash and then deposit it!

The banks have a huge financial interest in making your on-line experience so good that you only go to their branches and ATMs when you absolutely have to. Yet, their IT solutions (to customers) are so limited. I'd understand if banking was a highly competitive industry and they were working on paper-thin margins. Conversely, the airlines ARE working on paper-thin margins, yet for your $40 intercity flight, you can book and check-in online, including selecting the seat you want! The take-home message is that oligopolies always lead to poor customer service.