Benchmark shines light on online banking

The local banking industry needs to lift is online service delivery game with the launch of a new benchmarking index that will measure the Web site performance of 14 bank Web sites every month.

The Gomez Web Performance Benchmark by Compuware rates response time, availability and consistency for the most popular bank Web sites.

In the first survey, from May 7 to June 7, Westpac was the top performer with a 0.16 second response time, 100 per cent availability and 0.10 second site consistency.

At the other end of the scale RaboPlus, the Bank of Queensland and CitiBank rated the worst for those respective categories.

The benchmark will be conducted every calendar month.

Compuware vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Steve Jobson, said the purpose of the benchmark is not to expose poor service delivery but to highlight areas of improvement from a customer perspective in a controlled way.

“The benckmarking is done in a controlled environment and can deal with network and client performance issues,” Jobson said.

“At some stage services will come inside the firewall and the ability to highlight a point of failure becomes more difficult and costly.”

Compuware acquired SaaS Web performance company Gomez late last year and has since been integrating its public cloud tools with is Vantage enterprise software.

“We underwent a business transformation two years ago to focus on our heritage of 30 years in application performance tools,” Jobson said.

Jobson said with the Gomez acquisition in late 2009 its application performance suite extends from “inside out” of the firewall to “outside in”.

With more enterprise Web applications becoming “mash ups” of internal and cloud services, Compuware solutions director, Rafi Katanasho, said using a SaaS service gives the option of an integrated approach to performance management.

In order of response time rating, the top banks are:

Westpac
Adelaide Bank
St George Bank
ANZ Bank
ING Bank
Macquarie Bank
Commonweath Bank
Bendigo Bank
NAB
BankWest
Bank of Queensland

At the bottom end of the scale of response time is RaboBank with a 16.54 second response time.

Katanasho said one of the reason for such a poor response time is location of data centres outside of Australia.

“If it takes more than two seconds to get an online response customers get frustrated,” he said. “The good news is most of Australia’s banks meet that level. The bad news is many customers experience slower response times so there us considerable room for improvement.”

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