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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.


Online Statement Centers PDF Print E-mail
Online Statement Centers are an important feature within online banking, allowing clients to view current and past statements, with well-designed centers having the ability to convince card holders to suspend paper delivery.   In this Credit Card Monitor Report, we looked at what types of online statements are available from each issuer tracked by our coverage firms. Additionally, the ease with which users can locate the Online Statements Center is an important aspect, along with the length of the firm’s statement archive, and the options for clients to modify their delivery preferences, allowing them to choose to receive hard copy statements or to go paperless.

As we investigated each firm’s Online Statement Center, we focused on the following issues:
  • Does the issuer offer online statements as true-to-paper PDFs?
  • How many months of statements are provided standard online and can additional statements be requested?
  • Is an online tool offered for clients to enroll in paperless Statements and to request the resumption of paper statement delivery?
All 10 firms tracked by Credit Card Monitor offer PDF statement downloads on their private sites, with 90% of these issuers offering true-to-form PDF statements, where the design and content match the hardcopy statements card holders receive each month. Although statements are an important feature of online banking, only 40% of firms offer the Statement Center within their main navigational menu; the Statement Center is accessible within sub-menus or flyout tabs for the remaining firms.

Among all Statement Centers, issuers provide between three and 36 months of immediately available statements, with two firms offering an increase in statement archive to clients who switch to paperless statements. In order to help provide the full statement experience to clients, 70% of firms offer the Important Account Information that is typically found on the back of hardcopy statements as a page within the downloadable PDF; two issuers offer this information as a separate PDF.

Firms are constantly trying to get clients to “go green” and switch over to paperless statements by suspending the delivery of hard-copy paper statements. Currently, 80% of issuers include private site ads that promote the availability of online statements. Additionally, all issuers now enable users to enroll in online-only statements through the private site, with all but one firm also enabling the restart of hardcopy statement delivery via the same private site tool.

Additional key findings include:
  • Private site tools to request hardcopy replicas of back statements are offered by seven firms, with two of the firms offering the upload of these back statements directly to the private site.
  • Two firms are currently offering chances in a sweepstakes for clients who switch to paperless statements
 
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