No happy landing when banks ignore old marketing rules

IN the next few years, we are told, banks and other financial services will know so much about our wants and needs, thanks to big data, that it will feel as if the financial app or site we visit was designed specifically for each of us as individuals.

Of course, we should not believe everything we’re told. The sad truth is that banks will find it impossible to evolve into the “Bank of Me” while the marketing of their services is more important than the services themselves.

One need only visit the websites of major South African or British banks to see the essential clue to the industry ignoring the old rule that the medium is the message. For them, first comes the message — that is, how much they can do for us — and then you can click through to the medium — that is, banking.

The exception is First National Bank, which introduced the “novel” concept of allowing users to log in directly from the front page more than a decade ago. The other major banks in South Africa, namely, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Absa, Capitec and Investec, all require a click through to a log-in page.

In the UK, the big five — HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, RBS and Standard Chartered — all provide a landing page, dense with marketing, on which one must find the link to the banking log-in page.

The savvy user will quickly learn to bookmark the log-in page, which means the marketing message is lost because the user heads straight for the banking medium.

All the effort that goes into the message design is lost. This includes public-service and security messages, such as alerting users to banking scams. This is precisely the purpose to which FNB puts its log-in page, which includes a menu alongside the log-in boxes, and devotes most of the space to security warnings.

Ironically, in a country where the banking system is reputed to be far behind that of South Africa, the US, leading banks have long since learned the dirty secret of the wasted landing page. The top four — Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — all have log-in front pages.

The logic is simple and seemingly obvious: the most likely visitors to a banking website are the bank’s own customers. The most likely activity by a bank’s customers on its banking website is, well, banking. This means that, if the log-in window isn’t on the front page, users will click through to it as quickly as possible.

The excuse often given is that a log-in page needs to be hosted on a secure server, which slows down the loading of the page. A content-oriented landing page, on the other hand, does not need heavyweight security, ensuring minimal waiting time for the page to load. However, this argument ignores the fact that an extra page has been placed in the way of the user’s real intention, which negates the time saved in loading.

To be fair, South African banks tend to have among the most sophisticated banking apps in the world. However, there is a disconnect between how focused the apps are on their core purpose, and how unfocused the websites are.

Big data isn’t going to fix that problem if it doesn’t tell the banks how we would prefer to use their sites.

Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee

The savvy user will quickly learn to bookmark the log-in page