Bank websites lift game in July

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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.

Bank websites lift game in July

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
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