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Banking and Cards Research

Digging into the Customer Experience: Banking and Credit Cards

Corporate Insight’s Bank Monitor, Credit Card Monitor and Small Business Card Monitor provide ongoing coverage of the products, websites and overall customer experience offered by the nation’s leading banks and card issuers. Our value-added banking and credit card research digs deeply to evaluate the retail and small business customer experience.


Going Green PDF Print E-mail
Over the past two decades, ever increasing numbers of American consumers have become concerned about how their actions impact the environment. This concern about environmental impact has extended in many cases to industries and firms with which consumers interact, including the financial industry. In this edition of Bank Monitor Report, we investigate the environmental initiatives that firms have undertaken on the account and client level over the past two years, and look at the availability of green information from the firm.


Abstract:

In recent years, many banks have instituted resource-saving options and have begun to provide environmental information for clients, while others have offered limited-time promotions for account holders to try out eco-friendly account features. In this report, we look at the current state of Green initiatives offered by banking firms, including account features, limited-time incentives and anything else related to Going Green. In particular, as we investigated this topic at each of the 16 Bank Monitor firms, we concentrated on the following issues:
  • Do firms enable clients to suppress paper statements via the private site?
  • Are they offering incentives to do so?
  • Are any banks offering eco-related rewards programs?Which firms offer information about their environmentally-friendly actions online? 
The most prevalent eco-friendly option provided by banks in this report is a Paperless Statements capability, a feature offered every bank. Despite the ubiquity of this tool, however, only 25% of firms promote this option as an environmentally-responsible account feature on their sites, with many instead promoting it as a space-saving or security feature. Beyond this, only a few firms have taken a pro-active stance towards promoting their environmental records and initiatives online, with two banks offering standalone informational sites about environmental matters (one of which is a blog), and limited numbers of other firms dedicating space to eco-related issues (and their own environmental plans) on their main public sites. The leader in our report stands out for both providing some environmental plans and information its site, and for offering the only environmentally-centered rewards program of any bank we track. This rewards program offers clients $0.10 for each non-paper transaction they make, providing a nice cash incentive for limiting the use of paper and at the same time helping reduce the firm's processing costs.
 
As we delved further into the current state of banks' environment-related activities and consumer options, we uncovered the following additional Key Findings:
  • One firm uses a public site section to promote its program of building LEED-certified branch locations
  • A navigational tab labeled Green is offered on one banking public site, offering information on eco-friendly policies and accounts
  • Just over 33% of firms have used interstitial pages within the past 30 months to promote paper suppression or other eco-friendly account options
 
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