At a time when some in the industry are reexamining their use of account aggregation, Citibank has recommitted itself to it, this week unveiling a redesigned Web site that uses Yodlee Inc.'s technology to let customers view and manipulate all their accounts, even ones from Citi rivals.
Aggregation is central to the new site. Customers can organize the My Citi home page to show their various accounts and get news headlines, using a single sign-on.
"We are continuously looking to improve," Catherine Palmieri, a vice president of the Citibank unit of Citigroup Inc. and the Internet director at Citibanking North America, said in an interview Thursday. The changes followed focus groups and other research, she added: "We are responding to customer feedback."
The redesign does not have a lot of new features but is pared down in a way that lets customers get where and what they want quickly.
American Express Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. among the latest to reassess aggregation. Both companies expressed the need to incorporate the service into their main offerings without making customers sign on separately to view aggregated data.
Ms. Palmieri downplayed customers' ability to pull in information from accounts at competing companies.
"To aggregate all your Citi accounts is a great thing," she said. It is merely a bonus that customers could draw in data from outside companies, a capability long touted by Yodlee.
Ms. Palmieri said that Citibank turned down a feature started in May by Yodlee that lets financial services companies study information that its customers aggregate at Yodlee's site for competitive intelligence.
"The privacy of our customers is absolutely assured," she said.
The new Web site also provides tiered access to retail accounts - an offering common for corporate cash management customers but rare on the consumer side. This means, for instance, that parents can look at all the family's deposit accounts and have their children see only the accounts in their own names, Ms. Palmieri said.
As to the question of one spouse's limiting the other's access to brokerage or savings accounts, she said that was a matter of regulatory compliance, depending on whether the accounts were issued jointly or individually.
Chris Musto, the vice president of research at Gomez Inc. in Waltham, Mass., said that in the past banks tended to offer aggregation and online banking separately. But Citi is among several that have integrated aggregation into online banking, offering single-sign-on access to both services.
The others that have done this, Mr. Musto said, include KeyCorp, Wells Fargo, Wachovia Corp. (under the First Union brand), FleetBoston Financial Corp., and NetBank Inc.
Citibank's implementation is "not that smooth," Mr. Musto said, adding that the new design retains navigational elements of the old one. "That can be very confusing for the customer."
Despite what Mr. Musto said were navigation difficulties with the old Citi site, it had been No. 1 in Gomez' twice-yearly scorecard of banking Web sites (the latest one was published before Citi's redesign was rolled out).
"Citibank is better at the getting-started part" - at making enrollment easy for customers, Mr. Musto said. With the redesign, "they've understood what important information they need to bring to the front."
