This is why you should think twice about dropping a turnkey portal onto your Web site. When we tried to register for Webster Bank’s myWebster portal (via IE 5 browser), our Norton Anti-virus program unexpectedly popped up telling us we had downloaded a virus. While it was probably just an innocuous bit of Java code built into the registration form (there was no virus alert using Netscape 4.6), the average user would run, not walk, to a different bank. What if a local reporter got this message? How would your customer service reps handle this apparent crisis? These are problems you don’t need. We emailed the screen captures to the portal vendor Combio (which handles portal tech support for Webster) and within a few hours we were assured it was “probably nothing,” but we never did hear back from Combio or the bank as to what was really going on.

We have long advocated the development of personal finance portals or personal finance hubs; a place where consumers can centralize matters that affect their financial situation and planning. See Building the Amazon.com of Financial Services, first published in the summer of 1998 and updated this fall.

However, we have advised against banks getting into the general portal business in competition with Yahoo, Excite, Netscape, AOL, MSN, etc. A bank, or group of banks, cannot expect to keep up with these well-capitalized specialists. Just because you advertise a lot in the newspaper, doesn’t mean you should launch your own daily.

Recently, a number of vendors have been touting turnkey portal solutions to the banking community. Two of the most recent entrants are Portana and Combio. Here are a few reasons why you should be careful about turning your Web site into a general-interest portal:

•  Brand confusion: You want your customers to think of you when they want to store cash in a safe place, shop with a credit/debit card, borrow for a big ticket item, fund their IRA, and so on. If you drop your customers onto a page with horoscopes, car ads, sweepstakes, and Search with Mamma (from Portana), will you remain top-of-mind when it’s time to apply for a home equity loan?
•  Employee/management focus: You want your employees focused on the bottom line.  Can you afford to have customer service staff and branch managers answering questions and concerns about why the lottery results are late today? No matter how “turnkey” the program, there will always be problems and concerns that you ultimately must address (see the screenshot on
  p. 8 for a real-life example).
•  Merchant friction: If you have an Avis button on your Web site and you bank the local Enterprise rental car dealer, what kind of feedback do you suppose you’ll get from your client?

You can mitigate these concerns by keeping your portal simple and following these guidelines:

No outside Banner advertising¹: There is nothing more annoying than outside banner ads on a bank Web site. We know it’s tempting to sign-on with a portal that promises to turn your Web site from a cost center to a profit center through the use of outside advertising. Don’t do it. The few dollars you pick up in advertising revenue will be obliterated by the lost revenue due to service problems, lack of focus on bank products, and so on. Look at it another way: the NPV of an incremental $100,000 home equity line of credit is as much as $10,000. How many automobile and Pokemon ads must you present to equal that value to your shareholders? At $5 per thousand (CPM), you would have to run 2 million banners to earn $10,000.²

Don’t use the portal as your home page: Again, it’s tempting to try to cut your Web budget by turning your home page over to a portal concern. But that takes the control away from you for one of the most important delivery, sales and service tools of all time. It would be like giving your branches to Kinko’s in exchange for a kiosk in their lobby. Make the portal an option off the home page with a name like personal productivity center or my finances similar to how Webster Bank implemented the Combio portal .

Localize the content: We think you’ll have a much better chance of gaining a following if you report local Little League scores rather than NBA results. But it’s much harder to do. You might want to enlist branch-based resources. Combio’s system, for one, is flexible enough to allow branch employees to input information directly into the system.

Focus on “ad-free” utilitarian content: Rather than reporting the latest gyrations of the NASDAQ, provide users a quick way to accomplish routine tasks online such as getting directions, looking up a telephone number, checking the weather, and so on.

Enlist local merchants: Although we don’t think you should run banner ads (see #1), portal providers usually allow some degree of integration of local merchants into the portal content; for example, Combio provides templates for merchants to build their own page off your site. More interesting, Combio provides a mechanism that allows you to easily place your merchants at the top of results returned by Google Web searches. A bank employee simply enters your merchant URLs into the system and those are checked first during Web searches initiated from your bank’s portal.

Integrate the Portal: While it won’t be possible or even desirable to mimic every aspect of your Web site on the portal, try to maintain consistent navigation as much as possible. Allow users to easily navigate to and from the portal. Logged-in online banking users should be able to use their personalized portal page without reentering a username and password.

¹Sponsorship and co-marketing can be used effectively (see #5).  Also, because of their link to merchants and shopping, users may be more tolerant of advertising at credit card Web sites.

²This doesn’t even factor in the potential lost sales from brand confusion or the internal cost to deal with outside advertising issues.

Choosing a Vendor

There are several dozen portals being pitched to banks. Two of the most visible, in part because of their substantial presence at BAI’s just-concluded Retail Delivery Conference, are Portana, a joint venture between Net banking platform vendor FundsXpress and bank marketer FISI Madison, and Combio a tech company out of California.

Of the two, Combio is the better looking and most functional; however the 47-question registration form (screenshot below) and virus alert  in its Webster Bank installation are cause for concern. Banks wanting to work with a more established company and/or wanting a prepackaged multi-media marketing program centered on the portal should look hard at Portana. Portana is also easier and quicker to implement and potentially costs less if you are willing to put up with banner ads. You’ll also want to take a look at some of the other portals targeted to banks from Online Resources, Open Systems, Digital Insight and others.

Portana as seen at Union Planters. Note the annoying banner ad for AdForce, irrelevant for 99% of the bank’s customer base.

Portana Showcase Banks*

*Recommended by Portana PR agency, PetersGroup Public Relations, 12/5/00; as of Dec. 1, 300 banks had signed up and 60 were live

Portal Face-off:
Combio vs. Portana

Source: Online Banking Report, 12/00

Webster is pushing enrollment in its myWebster portal (powered by Combio) with a $10k sweeps. The sweepstakes would have been a whole lot more enticing had the registration form not triggered a virus alert on my computer (see screenshot page 8).

The Webster Bank portal registration asked users to state preferences or provide answers to 47 items. Although most were optional, the first 6 demographic questions, including annual income, had to be completed to process the registration. This is way too much to ask for entry into a generic portal. Portana at Union Planters only required name and email address, with optional fields for gender, birth date, and zip code.

Registering didn’t do much to localize the content. I got my local weather, but the “local news” and about everything else was still from Connecticut, Webster Bank’s home territory.