While @Hoc appears to be the only major firm building custom toolbars, most of its work is in the intranet and B2B/extranet area. Its six-figure licensing deals generally include just 20,000 to 30,000 seats; a consumer bank with hundreds of thousands of potential users would need a more cost-effective solution. (However, we’d expect @Hoc to be flexible if a financial institution walked in with a six-figure check.)

For a fraction of the cost, you could contract with one of the dozens of shareware/freeware vendors building browser plug-ins and toolbars, or put the project up for bid at eLance.com. Kyle Dusang owner of Harmony Hollow Software, publisher of Add-A-Button, told us that it would cost just a couple thousand dollars to develop a proprietary bank-branded toolbar. This was echoed in our conversation with Six Cube Technologies  www.sixcube.com  in India, who quoted us a price of US$1,950 for a bank-branded toolbar (see screenshot at bottom).

Download.com offers 44 toolbars available for download, most from small software publishers. We tried one from AppPlus  www.appplusonline.com  that was easy to use, and had some great features like docking anywhere along the edges of the screen, and the option of minimizing to the system tray (see above).

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A better-looking toolbar, one that we did not try ourselves, is available from Six Cube Technologies (see above). The company’s IE Bar  www.sixcube.com/products.htm  features shortcuts to your Web pages, a search function, custom skin (background on the toolbars), and a popup blocker button, a potentially useful customer service benefit

Finally, on a lark we typed “toolbar” at eBay (using its toolbar of course), and found UK-based developer  Christopher Ridings  christopher.ridings@ntlworld.com  with a custom toolbar listed for $49.99. He provides a toolbar-building kit and a license to distribute the results directly from your Website. For more information, refer to his Website,  www.iebar.com  It sounds too good to be true, but it might just work. We downloaded the free trial software and in less than 10 minutes had thrown together a passable toolbar that connects to various areas within U.S. Bank (see screenshot above).

These low-budget toolbar kits don’t offer the level of integration and interactivity as the multi-million dollar versions from eBay/Google/Yahoo. But for a bank, they provide 80% of the benefits for less than 1% of the cost. Not a bad trade-off.

The Google and eBay toolbars are good examples to follow. While banks don’t have time-sensitive auctions to track or billions of Websites to search, they do offer “content” that consumers wish to track closely: bills, payments, loans, credit cards, and bank balances. Following are mockups of potential banking toolbars.