This morning when I checked my Google Reader to see if there was any news about Vancity since yesterday, I came across a nice little surprise.

An article in one of Canada’s top national daily papers, the Globe & Mail had an article entitled TD rides customer service strategy to top of online survey ranking.

Yeah..? So..?

The article is about a recent analysis by Surviscor of the top Online Banking sites in Canada. I was so pleased to see Vancity ranked number four, nestled in between our top national banks, who can outspend us like crazy.

Here are their rankings:
TD Canada Trust 69.27
Royal Bank of Canada 64.40
Bank of Nova Scotia 61.85
Vancity 53.44
CIBC 53.13
National Bank 51.90
Bank of Montreal 49.45
Coast Capital Savings 49.33
President’s Choice 42.34
Desjardins 41.30
ING Direct 31.34

For me, representing a small player among the big national Canadian fish, this is amazing news. Here’s their commentary about vancity.com:

Vancity proved that they can play with the big boys in terms of offering a good online banking product, relative to the other Canadian banks. The online offering offers customers the basic features and functionality but does lack the additional features required to enhance the online experience. There is still room for improvement as its score suggests.

Fair enough. Happy we’re meeting the basics, and it’s true that we don’t offer all the things the big guys do. But I’m working on it, and hopefully the next time this is run we score better and even better the year after that.

In case you’re wondering, here are Surviscor’s categories of review:

• Getting Started
• Website Design
• Customer Support
• Website Transactions
• Service Rates and Fees

One more thing. This absolutely proves the co-operative model. If we were left on our own to run our own online banking system, we couldn’t afford to compete with the national banks. We’d be on our own. But we’re not. Because of our partnership with Central 1 Credit Union, the credit union central covering BC and Ontario, all BC CUs come together and decide our online banking future together. We share costs and see ourselves united (well, most of the time) so that our members don’t have an inferior online service experience compared to the banks. This report shows that the model is working.

Hats off to Kelly West at Central1, in so many ways this is truly his accomplishment.