 
15/06/1996
Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce
ITALIAN BANKS CHARGING INTO THE INTERNET
by Miran Pecenik
Pecenik Miran
has been with Banca di Credito di Trieste since 1978. With past
experience in CED, he moved to Organisation a couple of years ago,
where he has been coordinating several projects such as the creation
of an integrated internal network, the introduction of distributed
office computing, the revision of the internal IT system and a pilot
project on the Internet. At the moment he is Head of Information
Technology.
Banks! What unassailable, gray and double-breasted institutions,
what symbols of stability and safety, austerely filled with columns,
capitals and arches!
Yet, even in Italy they are discovering the Internet. In the United
States it is normal for banks to be on line, providing the largest
spectrum of services, without overarching concern over problems
of security or over the exact measurement of diffusion among businesses
and households. Now that scores of American banks can be found on
the Net, the phenomenon shifts to Europe on a massive scale, first
in the United Kingdom, and then on the continent. Even in Eastern
Europe a significant number of banks are now on the Net.
In Italy banks started to develop their sites during the summer
of 1995. Six banks came to the Web in the last fortnight of September
and among them there was ours. From the very beginning we have been
monitoring the development of new sites among Italian banks, with
a dedicated page http://www.bctkb.it/bctkb/finabkit.htm
where one can nowadays find around 70 links.
Dividing these sites geographically, one finds that 65% of them
lead to banks in the North of the country. Looking at the number
of pages, one discovers that 33% of all sites either provide one
page only, or are not available anymore. Only 10% of all banks offer
surfers a menu with more than 50 pages. The same percentage of banks
provides pages in English, only one of bank has pages in Slovene
and again only one in German. As for technology, only 5% of all
sites makes use of Java and another 5% of Netscape 2.0 frames.
With reference to the kind of service provided, one can identify
a range of corporate strategies. The information available can be
divided according to the following criteria:
- STRUCTURE
OF THE BANK (organization chart, ownership structure, internal
organization, balance sheets and financial statements, history,
description of hardware) with address of local branches (photographs
of staff members, branch supervisor, up to the managing director,
with search engines on a database of some hundreds of records,
a list of branches abroad), of financial intermediaries, of
shops accepting bank charge-cards (POS) and of affiliated banks
abroad (including their web links);
- DESCRIPTION
OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES (divided according to customer group:
kids, young people, elderly people, professionals, businesses,
women, artisans, etc.), offer of the month, bank information
(info brochures available to customers), bank manuals (documents
necessary to open or renew an account, a credit scheme, or a
mortgage, to request direct payments or direct debits facilities,
to order a credit card, to communicate the loss of a check,
to purchase treasury bonds, to block cash cards);
- ADVERTISEMENT
CAMPAIGNS (sponsorships, cultural events, advertisement on checkbooks,
free-phone promotion, telephone banking or traditional home
banking, publications, participation to fairs and congresses,
press reviews);
- FINANCIAL
NEWS (on line data on the stock exchange or on currency markets,
periodic news on national or international economic conditions,
research of past interest and exchange rates, financial glossary);
- INTERNET
SERVICES (service provision, lease to business of hard disk
on the server and of service therefor, special offers to finance
Internet link), navigation (link to external sites grouped by
type of customer, links to other banks, especially virtual banks
in the States or to parent banks, links to other Italian banks),
electronic mail (direct e-mail, e-mail using forms or e-mail
to the Internet provider for those banks on the Internet using
outsourcing), pages for "those in the business" on
html references, counters, downloadable teaching or technical
software, on-line technical manuals).
- INTERACTION
WITH CUSTOMERS (request of meeting, communication via forms,
request of cash cards, simulation of credit or mortgages repayments
plans, electronic C.V. to help young people to find a job, complaints
counter)
- OTHERS
(picture of the local coffee shop or of the mayor, art galleries,
golf tournaments, auction sale of goods, what's new, calendar,
local news)
Given such a wealth of information, one could feel that nothing
is missing. I disagree. There is still a great deal for everybody
to do, before one can say that Italian banks are truly on the Web.
I feel that the main deficiencies can be groups in four categories
and more precisely:
1) lack of HOME BANKING, both on informational and on operational,
possibly integrated with existing automatic informative services
(which by then become outdated). From a survey carried out this
year at Cebit in Hannover it is clearly visible that customers want
more financial services - it seems that, up to now, no European
bank offers a decent Internet-banking, whereas in Italy unconfirmed
rumors claim the start of two such banks in the very near future....;
2) FEAR OF NATIONAL COMPETITION (the larger the number of links
offered, even when targeted to specific groups of customers, the
higher the frequency at which users come back to the initial link
page, the higher the contribution to an improvement in the quality
of the whole site): it is necessary to pursue cooperation with competitors
to ensure a better service to customers;
3) availability of GENERAL INFORMATION to net-surfers on how to
interact with banks (for all banks, the number of customers-visitors
is extremely low), providing at the same time less data on one own
bank (but choosing the most significant ones) thus EASING to the
greatest extent navigation (it costs us nothing, but a lot to the
reader), avoiding graphic-intensive pages and monitoring the speed
of outgoing pages at other providers;
4) insufficient VISIBILITY of banking sites, both nationally and
internationally (up to date there is normally an average 6 to 7
Italian banks on most common lists, which is far too little) perhaps
by offering to integrate one own information with that of other
local providers, as to create a unique virtual site, that becomes
visible even in so-called geographical lists like CityNet, Yahoo,
Virtual Tourist, etc.
From what appears within the interbank circuit, one can forecast
that banks will shortly be forced to have something "Internet-like"
in house. Thanks to services initiated by some larger banks (Credito
Cooperativo, Caribusiness, etc.), many smaller banks will start
to perceive the WWW as both an internal and external tool to initiate
a technological and generation rejuvenation. So that, to end this
essay with some imagination, banks would be no longer perceived
as something from the past, but maybe referred to with a new acronym:
BBB (Building Best Bank)
Copyright Miran Pecenik, 17-May-1996
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