Monthly Archives: February 2009

Vancity ranked in top five online banking sites in Canada.

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.

Take your site Mobile.

A few months back I met Igor Faletski, founder of Handi Mobility, a Vancouver-based company that develops mobile services and applications.

They launched an extremely impressive service for TransLink, Vancouver’s transit authority, that lets you see the next five arriving buses at any given stop via SMS or iPhone. Impressive guy and company.

We chatted about mobile banking, but as a credit union we get our services from Central1 Credit Union, the credit union central covering BC and Ontario. I have spent the last two days with them and my impressive peers from CUs across Canada in User Group meetings covering the future of online and mobile banking for credit unions. We are in very good hands. Their strategy around mobile banking especially is smart, forward thinking and yet also pragmatic. High marks from me.

When I met with Igor, he mentioned he was developing a service he couldn’t quite talk about yet. And then last month I was at a session about mobile applications here in Vancouver, and Igor was on the panel. He unveiled a glimpse of his new service, and now it has launched.

It’s called Mobify.Me, and it is an amazing application. Their initial blog post sums it up nicely.

It will create a mobile friendly version of your website in a snap. For free. And then if you want extras you can pay for them. It’s a way to test a version of your site optimized for today’s mobile browsers quickly to see what it can do for you. I would think that credit unions who want to experiment optimizing their service for smart phones, but don’t know if it’s worth spending a lot of budget on it would be able to take advantage of this service and gain some excellent knowledge. If you have your web developer spend a couple of hours with the CSS this service spits out, you can make it look even better.

And then it will mirror your main site. When you update content on your main website, the mobile site will automatically optimize that content for mobile browsers.

Pretty amazing stuff.