Here is the opening screen at Juniper Bank, a browser check. A strange way to use $100+ million of venture capital.

After months of buildup, Juniper Financial (Wilmington, DE) launched pretty much on schedule, Oct. 31. Although its Web site is unpolished in a number of respects, our initial review rates it one of the best efforts in cyberspace. We especially like the ATM finder that helps users find a nearby ATM that accepts Juniper deposits. In our North Seattle neighborhood, several choices came up, all within a few blocks. The UPS connection for overnight deposits is also done well.

Deposit locator buttons
on home page.

On the downside, the site launched with an extremely odd and undesirable feature: a browser check before “allowing” users access to the home page which runs in secure mode. This gatekeeping is an extremely non-user-friendly feature, and it makes one question the overall Web-savviness of the company. We’ll have a full review in an upcoming issue.

Table 8

Launch Monitor

number of Net-only brands launched by year

Source: Online Banking Report, 11/20/00

Last month we reported on X.com’s decision to drop banking services to focus fully on its popular PayPal payment service . It turns out X.com isn’t totally turning its back on banking. At the same time it announced the closure of its full-service banking operation, the company added a money market option that paying 5.2% interest on balances held in PayPal accounts. To begin earning interest, users simply have to provide their social security number to X.com to meet IRS withholding rules.

Since X.com offers payment capabilities and interest on deposits (sounds a lot like a checking account), we’ll continue to classify the company as a Net-only bank, albeit a specialized one. OneCore is the other Net-only “bank” on our list that doesn’t actually have a bank charter.¹

¹Also, NextCard has a credit-card-only charter; Juniper Bank doesn’t have its own charter, its using Columbus Bank and Trust for banking services.

Table 9
Web Traffic at the Nine Busiest Net-Only Banks

thousands of unique users¹ by month

Source: PC Data Online <pcdataonline.com>, 11/15/00

n.m. – not measured

¹Unique users as measured by PC Data’s 100,000+ member panel

²Includes PayPal.com

³Includes some duplicate (non-unique) users across different companies

⁴Only 9 Net-only banks had more than 108,000 unique visitors in October, the minimum traffic level to be measured by PC Data that month

October traffic at the nine busiest Net-only banks increased 11% to 19.2 million (see Table 9 above). X.com and NextCard continued to battle for the top position, with X.com hitting number one again with growth of 1.9 million unique users in October.  X.com/PayPal was the 55th most popular Web site in October reaching 9.7% of U.S. Internet users. During the month, each user viewed 47.2 pages and spent just under 32 minutes at the site. Total page views were 407 million.

NextCard increased its user base by 1.4 million in October to 6.6 million users, the 76th busiest Web site. However, its users were less active, viewing 12 pages on average, and spending only 6.5 minutes at the site.

BankDirect was the big loser of the month dropping 78% to 150,000 unique users, its lowest total since May. NetBank also declined by almost a half-million unique users (27%), but still drew more than 1.2 million, double its May-to-August average.

PayPal announces that users now have the option of receiving money-market returns on balances held in any PayPal account.