Bendigo, Adelaide Banks rebound in online benchmarks

Websites of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank returned to form last month after a security upgrade slowed response times in November.

The bank more than halved the average response times of both websites, to be ranked second and third on Compuware's December 2010 web performance audit for the Australian banking industry.

Adelaide Bank's website achieved an average response time of 0.453 seconds in December, 1.616 seconds in November and 0.549 seconds in October.

Meanwhile, the website of Bendigo Bank was found to respond in 0.644 seconds in December, 1.546 seconds in November and 1.173 seconds in October.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank CIO, Andrew Watts, attributed December's response time improvements to the fact that the bank upgraded its security perimeter in November.

The bank's network manager Chris Anderson told iTnews that the upgrade was a substantial, six-month-long evolution that concluded in November.

New Cisco, Checkpoint and F5 equipment was implemented after a tender process, to replace an ageing security perimiter that "had seen its best days", he said.

Watts said that the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank had not had "any significant customer feedback" about fluctuations in website performance.

Westpac remained on top of Compuware's list for average response time, availability and consistency of its website.

Rabobank, HSBC and The Bank of China performed most poorly, taking almost twice the average amount of time to respond to web queries when compared to the 19 banks surveyed.

Updated on 1 Feb 2011 to include Chris Anderson's comments.