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The Buffalo, N.Y. company has struggled to gain traction from last year's purchase of more than 100 HSBC branches.
March 19 -
First Niagara in Buffalo, N.Y., has named Inder Koul, a former Huntington Bancshares executive, as its chief information officer.
November 28 -
John Petrey, CIO of First Niagara, is handling a wave of Northeast and New England bank mergers. A consistent rip-and-replace strategy helps keep the IT conversions smooth and minimizes disruption.
November 1
About a year and a half ago, First Niagara's website was a link farm, Thomas Bontempo, senior vice president and digital marketing director, admits. "It had old technology, a visual style from 1999 and not much content," he says.
"A third party assessment found we were in pretty bad shape. The site didn't attract or acquire any customers. We would get 200 online accounts a quarter, which is not much for a bank of our size," he says (the Buffalo, N.Y. bank has $35 billion in assets). "You had to really want to have an account with us, because the account application process was a nightmare. If you could do it without calling us, it was a miracle."
The site had no content management system, it was based on Adobe Flash, and pages took 8 to 10 seconds to download. The industry average is 3.9 seconds per page.
The bank brought in Catalyst, a digital marketing firm based in Rochester, N.Y. to help with a website makeover. The firm created visual and content guidelines and templates for the site. Freelance copywriters were used to generate articles relevant to consumers' financial life stages (such as saving for retirement or college). In a "war room" in the bank, the guidelines were posted and new content was compared against the standards. Two phrases were posted on the wall: "The Vision" and "Done is better than perfect." The new site had to be completed in six months, to align with First Niagara's purchase of 200 HSBC branches (HSBC's online banking site was more sophisticated than First Niagara's, Bontempo says), so decisions had to be made quickly.
The new site's content is regionalized. When a customer logs in, he provides his zip code and receives localized content, such as articles about local sports teams. The website has been given a simpler design and navigation scheme. Products and services are grouped by lifestyle and life stage, such as "Active Retired," Students and "Living Comfortably." Customers self-select sub-segments such as, "Our second child means a second savings account," and "I'm tired of paying ATM fees." There are many photos of people representing the various life stages.
Since the site re-launch, traffic has gone up 30% and the time customers spend on the site has gone from 10-15 seconds to two minutes and thirty seconds. "They're actively shopping and looking for information on the site," Bontempo says. "We've improved online account opening and are now getting 500 funded new accounts online a month. That's still not where we need to be for a bank our size, but we've taken the right steps and it's the right direction." Customer satisfaction rose from 64% to 72% after the redesign, according to a survey the bank conducted.
One lesson learned, Bontempo says, is that it's important to get management buy-in. "If you don't activate and generate interest from your board and executives, you're not going to get investment," he says.
The customer also has to be sold, he says, on the benefits and ease or convenience of a new site.
Finding the right partner is also key. First Niagara chose Catalyst for its apparent understanding of interactive design and banking. "There's a component of digital marketing that's like traditional marketing," Bontempo says. The difference is an interactive agency understands what the customer will do in this space."
