Forrester Blogs » Category: Online sales

Welcome To Our Newest eBusiness And Channel Strategy Analyst

Posted by Brad Strothkamp on the eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog on November 3, 2011

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Brad Strothkamp

We are very excited to announce the hiring of our newest analyst in the eBusiness and Channel Strategy team – Tiffani Montez.

Tiffani joins Forrester from Wells Fargo where she spent 20 years managing various aspects of digital strategy, implementation, operations and cross-channel integration across lending, investments and customer service.  Tiffani joins a quickly expanding team which includes Peter Wannemacher, Bill Doyle, Ellen Carney and myself in North America dedicated to eBusiness and channel strategy for retail banking, lending, investments and insurance.

Tiffani’s will focus on digital financial service technologies including areas like mobile banking, personal financial management, online banking, person-to-person payments, automated account opening, etc. Tiffani will explore the vendor landscapes for these and other areas to help clients understand about how to make strategic vendor choices, implement new technologies, and create a operational team to manage the solutions once installed.

Additionally, Tiffani will expand on Forrester expertise in the lending area as well as cross-channel integration to drive sales and service strategies.

Tiffani can be found on twitter at @tiffanimontez

Brad

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National Australia Bank Tops Our Australian Bank Content & Functionality Benchmark

Posted by Benjamin Ensor on the eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog on October 22, 2010

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Benjamin Ensor

A few months ago I wrote here about our benchmark of the sales content and functionality of UK banks' sales sites. My colleague Vanessa Niemeyer has just published a benchmark of the big four Australian banks' sales sites. Crushingly for an Englishman, the Australians beat us. The four Australian banks achieved an average score of 56 (out of 100), compared with an average of 48 for the British banks.*

National Australia Bank (NAB) came top, just ahead of Westpac in second place, with Commonwealth Bank of Australia not far behind. The Australian banks demonstrate a series of good practices in their application processes, such as cross-selling during the application and automated confirmations. We highlight many of the good practices that the eBusiness teams at the Australian banks have developed in the report which is available for Forrester clients here.

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Does The UK Need Another Online Payment System?

Posted by Benjamin Ensor on the eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog on August 9, 2010

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Benjamin Ensor

I am intrigued by last week's announcement from UK payment processor VocaLink and Australian financial software vendor eWise that they are collaborating to build an online banking transfer payment system for the UK. Online banking transfer systems make it (fairly) easy for online shoppers to authorize payments through online banking by integrating the payment details into their bank's secure online banking site. The customer is routed directly from the merchant's site to the bank to authorize the payment and back again.

In the Netherlands, the iDEAL online banking transfer system has been highly successful. It's now used by some 10 million Dutch online shoppers for about 5 million transactions a month. But the UK's online shopping market is different to the Dutch one in a couple of important ways. Firstly, debit cards can be used to pay online in the UK. Since almost all adults have a debit card, paying online is not a big problem in the UK, unlike many other European markets. Secondly, UK Net users have always been relatively complacent about online security compared with other Europeans. That means that one of the primary attributes of an online banking transfer system -- more robust security -- may not cut that much ice with British online shoppers.

Forrester has long argued that any new payment system needs to overcome three hurdles to succeed: providing a clear improvement over the existing alternatives, driving consumer and merchant adoption, and developing a viable business model for all parties.

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The Co-operative Bank Tops Our UK Bank Content & Functionality Benchmark

Posted by Benjamin Ensor on the eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog on June 17, 2010

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Benjamin Ensor

One of the most common questions banking eBusiness executives ask Forrester analysts is: "What do you think of my Web site?".  That's always a tough question to answer because what I think of a Web site depends on who I am and what I'm trying to use it for. To help UK bank eBusiness executives answer that question, my colleague Vanessa Niemeyer has just published a benchmark of the sales content and functionality on the Web sites of 10 of the UK's biggest banking brands, from the perspective of a typical customer trying to switch current account provider.

Some background: UK Net users are among the most likely anywhere in the world to use the Net to research and buy financial products. According to our Consumer Technographics® surveys,  almost 60% of UK Net users have researched a financial product online in the past 12 months, more than in any other European country. Two out of five UK Net users have applied for a financial product online in the past year, which is double the Western European average. So you might think that UK bank Web sites are all highly effective sales sites.

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