The Nuova Banca di Credito di Trieste (NBCT) is a small Italian bank located in Trieste, in the North-East region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Actually, it is a brand new bank, arosen from the ruins of its predecessor, the Banca di Credito di Trieste, founded in 1959 and whose bankruptcy has been officially announced last February, after a temporary receivership period. The takeover was made evident by a changement in the symbol of the bank and by the word "Nuova" (new) added to the bank's name, but for the time being the services offered by the bank to its 40,000 customers haven't been altered.

In spite of its economic vicissitudes, over the last year the NBCT has faced an unheard-of wave of popularity. Mass-media, information technology experts and academics as well as Italian and foreign banks have shared a deep interest in this small financial institution, whose uniqueness resides in its Web site. The case of the NBCT shows in fact how a bank's Web site can be converted from a mere virtual shopwindow into a useful tool for customers and net-surfers to search and access any kind of free financial information in the Web. Ultimately, the bank's site has proved a valuable and relatively low-cost means of autopromotion as well as a sort of icebreaker for many other banks wanting to charge into the Internet.



Pioneers in the Web

The history of this bank's Web site dates back to September 1995, when the first electronic pages took shape and appeared on the Internet. NBCT was the second Italian bank to open a web site. At the time it offered a few basic options, as many Italian banks are still doing now: an overview of the bank's services, some general information and news of local interest. Information was available in Italian, English and Slovenian, thus meeting the expectations of the bank's numerous foreign customers. But a complimentary service already gave a mark of distinction to the newborn site among the Italian banks on the Internet: a page containing online data on stock exchanges all over the world and updated information about currency markets was (and still is) available to the visitors of the site.

In a short time the site became also an operational working tool in the hands of the bank's employees thanks to the implementation of an intranet system.

In the course of 1996 new ideas and services kept on flourishing at a steady pace around the site. Many collaborations with national institutions were started. Pages were added constantly to the site in order to provide Internet surfers with the most comprehensive information available in terms of banks and finance. "Our priority has always been the accuracy of the financial data we inserted, because many companies and merchants use the information they find on our site for their daily businesses", explains Miran Pecenik, Head of the bank's Information Technology Department. "Moreover, we tried to attract visitors by often changing our home page and by offering every month new useful services".

Many other inter-institutional projects have been undertaken by the bank's Technology Department along 1996. A series of current numismatics pages has been set up in collaboration with the National Mint, while an agreement signed with the prefecture of Trieste allowed the release of local political elections' online results.

Some room is also left for local involvement. In this site citizens from Trieste can find practical assistance for things like local transport timetables, cultural events and sport facilities.

Now, a year and a half after its launch, the number of pages has jumped to four hundred. Around 70,000 hits are registered on a monthly base and about 3,000 email messages get to the bank's electronic mailbox each month. By now, the NBCT's site is a must for finance surfers both in Italy and abroad.



A restless, chameleonic site

The site has recently been integrated with a banking code of conduct and a collection and payment handbook, both framed by the Associazione Bancaria Italiana (the Italian Bankers' Association). There is also a new help page for online loan instalment calculations, jointly developed with another Italian bank, the "Cassa di Risparmio di Forli'". Moreover, the site is soon to become quadrilingual, as services will also be available in Croatian. It is an additional effort toprovide the bank with an international profile.

The site is proving a surprisingly good channel of autopromotion and a precious contribution to the bank's image. "It is difficult to quantify the value of this kind of promotion, but if it were quantifiable it would surely cost tens of millions Italian liras", claims Miran Pecenik. The site's annual costs amount to about 25 milions liras (about USD 15,000 ) and they are divided as follows: 5 million liras(USD 3000) for the provider, 15 millions (USD 9000) for the organization and the staff, 4/5 millions (USD 2500/3000) for the software. They are reasonable costs, if compared with the return in terms of added value and popularity.

The year-and-a-half experience on the Web has been summed up by Miran Pecenik in a sort of bank site's decalogue, of course accessible to anyone. The decalogue aims at becoming a helpful tool for any bank wanting to build the ideal Web site, or at least an open and efficient one. But things change almost every day in the Internet, and consequently the Web sites must be continuously updated. As a result, the NBCT's Information Technology Department keeps on working on new projects. The next service to be offered, a complete home banking program, was originally designed to start at the beginning of this year, but had to be postponed after the old bank's bankruptcy. An electronic commerce project was also due to start next May but has been freezed for the time being for the same reasons. Nevertheless, the two ideas are far from being abandoned. Taking advantage of the new bank's birth, the Information Technology Department is working in these weeks at a new strategic program, always with an eye at uniqueness and originality.


Contact: Miran Pecenik, NBCT, Italy. Tel.: +39 40 6700 488
The NBCT 's web site is: http://www.nbctkb.it/