Comscore report that people are using online banking less recently and marketeres ought to be worried. Comscore have it wrong here. (HT Finextra)
Credit Crunch bites online banking | Finextra
Marc Trudeau, senior director, financial services, comScore, says: “Americans have less cash, are spending less and have experienced a significant decline in the value of their assets. As a result, we’re seeing shifts in the way consumers manage their finances online, such as less frequent and shorter visits to their banking Web site, which has significant implications for marketers trying to reach new and existing customers.”
Any time we see a shift in customer usage patterns there is a reason. My immediate reaction is that we do not know the reason, so lets not fly off to worry about one thing, eg marketing, the last thing I would worry about. Lets worry about those customers – why are they not using online banking as much. Is because
- they are worried in general?
- they are avoiding their finances?
- they are busy worrying about work and job loss?
Relevance to Bankwatch:
This is one more example of how the internet is chaning things and how we just do not understand how that change is occurring.
Please lets NOT jump to the conclusion that people are using internet less therefore we have a problem, because mrketers will just seek new ways to stuff marketing down on people – time to move on.
Bankwatch 
Thank you Colin for bringing this up. Opinions from “strategists” who’ve logged in maximum 1 time are flooding the area once more while the ways to increase online usage remain the same regardless of the crisis. Adding value to the online service that one does not find offline (i.e. personal financial management tools), adoption of web 2.0 oriented interfaces designed by users for users, and easily accessible help (plus a lot of user training in our geography) are things that most FIs need to tackle first instead of wandering around in quest of THE reason.
Konstantinos http://THeNKbank.wordpress.com
I agree – this study alone doesn’t give us enough info. I’m thinking maybe it’s more about the investment side than traditional online banking. Does the study include retail investing visists as well as transaction banking? That’s what I’d like to know.
Comscore is grasping here. They analyze web traffic to websites and, from that, interpret user intent. So there’re fewer hits on big bank websites; so what? Maybe mobile usage points to sites Comscore doesn’t track. Maybe customers are using sites like Mint, Wesabe, Quicken and the like to view their banking information. Perhaps banks have gotten better at advertising within their online banking sites, which would decrease the average visit time for customers. Any of these, and many more, could explain the numbers that Comscore sees, but they immediately jump to the flashy headline: credit crunch — be afraid!!
Colin,
If the study is referring to consumer use (as opposed to commercial use), I would guess that it’s some combination of your three reasons. What is surprising to me about the study is the strange conclusion that this decrease in usage becomes a problem for the bank/cu because of their decreased ability to market to those users. Online banking is a tool designed to help users manage their money – not a marketing tool for the bank.
I agree with your sentiments that if banks would concern themselves less with “..significant implications for marketers trying to reach new and existing customers” and more with with the problems plaguing their customers, they would put themselves in the enviable position of taking an consultative approach to customer service rather than the purely transactional approach most currently take.
Good points here.
A couple more thoughts:
Comscore is only saying that “minutes per user” declined by a few percent at 4 of the 5 top US banks. They are NOT saying there were fewer visitors, fewer transactions, or fewer sessions, etc.
Without seeing all the data, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but from the face of it, less minutes per user could be good news, as long as other measures of engagement (eg bills paid, statements viewed) were not declining.
Several alternate conclusions could me made from this data point.
It could mean that as users gain experience with their banking website, they are able to perform their tasks more efficiently.
It could also mean they are having FEWER problems.
It could also mean that the banks have improved their websites, making it faster for their customers to do their banking.
All these are good things. In fact, unlike entertainment sites where growing minutes per user is an important goal, banks should usually be doing the opposite. Customers are going to MORE SATISFIED if they can do their online banking in less time.
Assume for a moment that Comscore is right …. that Less cash + lower spending + lower asset valuation = Less time spent on online banking site and less frequency of visits to OL banking sites.
This implies that previously — when cash was more plentiful, spending levels higher, and assets more highly valued — we went to OL banking sites to simply see how much money we had and how much we were worth.
I totally buy that interpretation. 🙂
Great points everyone – bottom line is that Comscore are “stretching” with their apparent conclusions, and marketing is just plain wrong.
Thanks Jim for the thoughts on why it may be happening, although it is co-incidental this happened in concert with the economic times – in tru form, perhaps Ron has it right!