How much the financial services online are developed in Spain?  87% out of a total of 110 savings banks and banks registered at www.bde.es 26th January 2010 has web page, with a special stand-out of the savings banks with 100% Internet presence.

Despite the importance of business search engines in the society 2.0, only 48% of this financial webs has a search engine in the homepage, and 39% out of those uses Semantic Search Engine technology.

User trends in online banking

This is the second Internet wave: the sceptical users’ one. This wave is basically marked by a large increase in the number of users and by their scepticism when it comes to surf the web:  they guess a lot of things can be done online, but they don’t have the time to do it. Sceptical users in online banking spend a definite amount of time (which is short) with the hopes of finding a product, an operation or a solution to their problem. As time goes by, they end up running out of hope, finally deciding not to do it online because it’s impossible or they are unable to find it. The online experience becomes frustration, and the user ends up choosing another way of interaction like the telephone, the email or a visit to the office bank.

As to the user trends and behaviours, eye-tracking studies have detected a pattern surfing the homepage, concluding that the user attention is focused on the upper left and upper right sides of the homepage; that attention increases when there is a search engine in those areas. Therefore, if you place a search engine in your homepage, you can be sure users will use it. How much? Around 30% of the unique visitors will make a search. Another interesting number about eye-tracking and user attention focused on advertising banners: 42% of the times users ignore web advertising; out of those that looked at it at a given time, 53% keeps the message contained in the banner.

User worries

What are the users searching in a financial web lately? Basically, the main worries during last year were related to Loyalty programs by points, real estate, office location, online operations and deposit hiring.

Despite being reiterative subjects, users have expressed these worries in the search engines in countless different ways, depending on the skills and experience of each one. Only 40% of the search queries will give results, and the importance of them will depend upon the search engine quality. But why is a search engine not working properly? The low performance of the traditional search engines is based on the syntactic process. Basically, they search web pages where your keywords are written, use a scoring system e.g. based on the number of times these keywords appear, and they show the results. The results relevance is usually low or non-existent, as we can’t always write or choose the right words that match with the contents of the web page. For this reason, a lot of times we make a search again deleting, adding or changing the keywords.

Semantic Search Engine

Is it possible to use a good search engine in a financial web? Absolutely yes. There are semantic search engines that ignore “how” the search was written, and that are focused on “what” the search means. Applying linguistic algorithms, better scoring and relevant results are achieved than using traditional search engines, and thus producing better results for the user. Using a Semantic Search Engine, relevant results are over 85%.

Online banking estimates for 2010

Web search engines will be vital for online and marketing strategies of banks. The trend in 2010 will be to provide a better online experience, that is, taking into account the users needs and worries, solving their problems providing relevant information,  creating customer loyalty and giving a good brand image.

The consequences of neglecting the online interaction are obvious. But nowadays, as social media and online reputation are in the limelight, the impact produced by a bad service can be awful and hard to be recovered.