Banking Web Sites Show Big Gaps in Performance

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August 11, 2003 (Computerworld) -- Keynote Systems Inc. last week said that an online performance showdown it conducted among eight top U.S. banks over a two-week period revealed a wide disparity in the speed and reliability of the monitored Web sites.

The average time it took to complete an account-balance-check transaction on the eight sites varied on a weekly basis from 8.16 seconds to more than 23 seconds, said San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote. The company added that the success rate for completing the transaction ranged from a high of 99.91% to a low of just 89.07%.

The performance data represents the first two weeks' worth of results from an online banking transaction-monitoring service that Keynote announced in May. Chase Manhattan Bank USA and Wells Fargo & Co. had the top two response times each week, while Washington Mutual Inc. and Bank of America Corp. brought up the rear, according to Keynote's automated measurements from 10 cities. Washington Mutual and Bank of America also occupied the last spots in terms of availability, Keynote said.

"We subscribe to a variety of monitoring services, and our ranking varies on each report," said Angela Clegg, vice president of the Technology Solutions group at Seattle-based Washington Mutual. "We're working diligently to optimize the performance of our Web site."

Questions Ratings

A spokeswoman for Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America said Keystone's ratings are "not consistent with our internal data or what we've seen in [other] external reports." She cited a performance-tracking study done by Waltham, Mass.-based Gomez Inc. that gave Bank of America the top response-time rating among banks for the period from July 19 to Aug. 1.

Keynote measured Web site response times and transaction completion rates during the weeks of July 21 and July 28, after opening an online banking account at each institution. The company said it monitored how long it took to access the banks' home pages, log into the accounts, check their balances and log out.

Brad Adrian, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said Keynote appears to have done a good job of factoring out exterior telecommunications network issues and focusing on internal Web site performance. He noted that online transaction speeds can be greatly affected by how well systems and databases are integrated. "The bigger the bank is, the more difficult it can be to tie these systems together in a good way," Adrian said.

Poor online performance can hamper customer retention efforts as well as attempts by banks to reduce costs, Adrian said. "The worst thing is for a customer to pick up a phone and ask if a transaction went through," he said.

Keynote analyst Roopak Patel said end-user authorization and data-encryption methods can also cause slowdowns in response times on Web sites. Heavy-duty approaches to authorization and encryption are "a benefit in terms of security, but not in terms of performance," Patel said.

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