American Express, US Bank and HSBC Deliver Highest Service Levels in Credit Card Industry

A new competitive intelligence study from Keynote Systems, The Internet Performance Authority®, shows American Express, US Bank and HSBC as providing customers with the best technical service levels in the credit card industry. The Keynote Service Level Rankings for Credit Card Customers tested the technical performance of leading credit card Web sites including an evaluation of overall site responsiveness and reliability.

In its service level studies, Keynote uses Transaction Perspective® measurement computers to mimic the actions of a consumer using Internet Explorer to interact with leading Web sites. For this study Keynote measured a typical user’s transaction online, including downloading the home page, accessing the most recent charges on the credit card, paying the credit card bill and logging out. The measurement computers performed these transactions over various connection speeds and from a distribution of geographic location over a one month period. The agents tracked more than 40 performance metrics and collected over 6500 data points on each site studied. Keynote analysts then used these data points to rank the sites in the study on seven key performance factors, which are critical aspects of the operational excellence for credit card Web sites. The sites were measured for this study between February 28th and March 27th of 2006.

The American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi, Discover, HSBC, MBNA, Providian, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo sites were evaluated for the study. Keynote also conducts regular customer experience and best practices studies of these leading credit card Web sites, as well as the Keynote Service Level Rankings for Prospective Credit Card Customers.

American Express, HSBC and Wachovia Excel in Site Reliability

According to the study, American Express, HSBC and Wachovia were the credit card industry’s most reliable Web sites, indicating those sites were highly available and experienced little or no downtime. Overall, the industry recorded just average reliability, with just 97.9% reliability during peak periods. American Express reported excellent reliability at 99.7% during peak periods. Several of the poorer performing sites recorded up to 40 hours of outage during the 500 peak hours studied, resulting in a poorer average reliability for those sites of just 94%. This mark is well below the threshold of 99% availability that Keynote recommends in order to remain competitive and provide quality service in the financial services industries.

US Bank, Bank of America and HSBC are Leaders in Site Responsiveness

US Bank, Bank of America and HSBC performed atop the Keynote rankings for site responsiveness, an indication of how fast the sites were in downloading pages and executing transactions. High speed (broadband) performance was excellent, with average home page downloads of 1.9 seconds and several home pages for leading sites loading in under 1 second. Dial-up performance for the industry improved over the past year with home pages loading in 32 seconds as compared to 42 seconds a year ago. As expected, the slowest loading pages were the account summary pages, which are typically displayed immediately after login and download customer data, and must authenticate the user. A number of sites across the industry showed extremely poor load handling and inconsistent performance, indicating general instability in the infrastructure and hosting environment for some leading credit card sites.

“We’ve seen a number of sites dropping off in performance,” said Ben Rushlo, manager of professional services with Keynote. “The Web environment is changing so fast that sites need to keep a consistent watch over service levels. Things that are not a problem today can quickly become problems.”

To read an abstract describing the study in more detail view: http://www.keynote.com/downloads/cem/Keynote_SLMCreditCardSE.pdf. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat or a comparable .pdf reader installed on your computer.