Three Ways to Improve Financial Services Websites

Recent trends in online business practices are changing our expectations of corporate websites and online services.

1. Developing nations are a rapidly rising force in business and technology.
2. The market is aggressively demanding innovative products.
3. Corporate website development teams more frequently adopt user-centered design practices.
4. Digital products have ever-increasing functionality.
5. Governments and cultures demand sustainability in business and design.
6. Consumers desire products that disappear into personal environments.
7. Businesses focus more on emotional/experiential marketing and design.

In many areas of business, these changes are pushing rapid innovation in product development and brand experience; companies are investing in design and product development, creating experiences instead of traditional advertising and integrating online and offline media. The financial services industry lags behind other fields in this respect.

Financial services online
We recently reviewed the websites of a number of different major financial institutions and have found a bland, undifferentiated, ineffective collection of online experiences. The current state of financial services websites is deplorable. The information and interaction models resemble those that were in vogue in the late 1990s; staid color and layout choices reflect a lifeless usability culture that has beaten design innovation out of the development process.

Despite this hegemony, most sites display inadequate to poor usability and brand equity. In addition, offline marketing expenditures are not being leveraged or extended toward the online experience. Perhaps the best example is Citi: rather than leverage and extend their highly successful offline marketing, their online experience instead joins the cacophony of unremarkable efforts being produced by their competitors. This gap is reflective of a pervasive trend, where companies prove unable to work their offline magic online. Considering the importance customer satisfaction with online visits has to the success of these companies, as we move away from human interactions in physical buildings toward exclusively online interactions, the current situation is puzzling—especially when we imagine how much the financial services sector has to spend on marketing and customer services. The good news is that this widespread complacency opens the door to opportunity for aggressive and enterprising companies that have the vision to step forward and provide a better online experience.

Innovating the online experience
Financial services companies can improve customers’ online experiences if they focus on three basic areas:

Integrate marketing channels.
Most companies continue to operate offline and online marketing activities independently or at cross-purposes; traditional marketing departments do not fully understand the benefits that an online presence offers, and developers lack the business training to see opportunities to entice customers. This is to the detriment of the overall organization, as a synthesis of these areas at both a strategic and execution level not only decreases a company’s total marketing budget, but also maximizes the impact of each dollar spent on marketing and development and creates a much-improved brand experience. The result is pointed inefficiency, where customers are not being brought more deeply or compellingly into the brand experience. The companies that enjoy the most success in the future will be those that break down the barriers between online and offline marketing and create a complete and immersive experience, thus creating engaged, passionate and loyal customers.

Explore progressive, but safe, technology.
Because computer and internet technology is constantly evolving and changing, financial companies are slow to invest in more progressive solutions. Today, viable and safe technology options exist that can dramatically improve the online experience. Rich Internet Applications offer desktop functionality on the web in a stable and almost universally accessible way. People more frequently trust downloadable desktop applications that provide an entirely new level of programming power and capability. Both companies and individuals have long been using thick client applications to manage their finances, such as the Intuit products Quicken and QuickBooks, so there is certainly a precedent for trusting downloadable applications for financial management and services. For more conservative companies, different programming languages and techniques enable the inclusion of rich components in largely HTML-based sites. Both kinds of technology are more robust; they significantly enhance customers’ online experiences and provide more power and teeth in the usage of data.

Improve interface design.
Financial services websites frequently display poor interface design. Designing a robust an intuitive interface is difficult; the development process is complex and multi-disciplinary and, typically, financial services companies do not truly understand interface design and create applications in ways that are fundamentally flawed, resulting in disappointing products. We have seen this in our own research, as well as conversations with clients and stakeholders involved in the industry. In fact, after giving a speech at a recent financial services conference, I was approached by two attendees who are part of the team responsible for the interface design of well-known financial services products, both of whom sheepishly bemoaned the design of their own interfaces. Everyone involved in the development process for online services must respect the need to balance competing concerns. Leaders must ultimately understand the discipline and make valid decisions (as opposed to the all-too-common design-by-committee approach to the web). By recognizing the inherent complexity of interface design, and structuring and executing talented and empowered design teams, the opportunity to provide a demonstrably better product is certainly there.

Conclusion
Various big-picture trends are changing the way business and design intersect. At the same time, particularly in the financial services industry, online experiences remain substandard. To some degree this can be reversed through good interface design, a complex and multi-disciplinary tapestry that companies have been slow to master. However, there are also opportunities to improve and even innovate the online experience through marketing, by integrating channels and truly synthesizing online and offline media, as well as technology, by taking a look at new and emerging technologies that are more robust and can dramatically improve the quality of the online experience. We simply need the courage and expertise to take the initiative and ably move into these new and exciting directions.

This article was first presented as a paper at the Blurred Boundaries, Focused Solutions conference in Boston, April 27, 2005. The conference was sponsored by the International Institute for Information Design (IIID). To learn more about IIID, visit their site at www.iiid.net.