Bank Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. (Schweiz) AG and Valartis Bank AG top our Swiss Banking benchmark

Nov. 20, 2012 - PRLog -- The bank, part of an international group, offers asset management and investment advice to its clients, and has moved 28 places up our table since we last looked at the sector in August.

In the latest web benchmark from Sitemorse, we took a close look at the websites of just over 200 of the best-known Swiss banks to see which of them were the most efficient. We don’t judge a site on the way it looks, or content, but purely on how well its users will find it works.

The Swiss financial centre, with banking as the leading sector, is of major international importance and among the global market leaders in many areas. The financial centre makes a substantial contribution to gross value added in Switzerland, and hence to the prosperity of the entire Swiss population.

Swiss banks are stringently licenced and can therefore certainly be counted amongst the safest in the world. But despite their secret reputation, anyone can open a Swiss Bank account and like anyone else, they compete for clients.

We looked at the top sites and found as usual a very mixed picture when it comes to functional excellence, compliance, performance and accessibility. We have carried out quarterly benchmarks of the banking sector in Switzerland for the last three years, and as usual, we found a small number of high-performing websites and many not so good.

Our research found that around five per cent of those tested were classed as ‘error-free’ by our methodology, a good score compared to other sectors such as retail or FTSE companies.

Sitemorse conducts regular surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website.

Also scoring highly this time were Valartis Bank AG in second place with a score of 7.8 out of a possible ten, and Lugano-based Banque de Dépôts et de Gestion, hanging on to its third position and with exactly the same score - 7.7 out of 10 - we awarded in Q3..

Since our last survey, several banks have climbed the table.  Mitsubishi UFJ Wealth Management Bank was up 86 places, Obwaldner Kantonalbank 81 places, and Banque Privee Edmond De Rothschild SA was up 57.

Rapid rises can happen when an organisation launches a new, more efficient site or improves an existing one. Other high climbers include Banque Cantonale Du Jura, up 10 places to eighth position in the table, Caisse d’Epargne Riviera, up seven to ninth place overall. New sites from Rosbank (Switzerland)  and Maerki Baumann and Co AG leap into our table at 13th and 17th places respectively.

Sitemorse concluded: All banks are not the same, and certainly our testing showed a large variation in the quality and efficiency of the Swiss banks surveyed, with marks ranging from eight out of ten down to less than a score of two out of ten. Even though none of the sites tested here is transactional in nature, having a website that works well is now essential both to maintain reputation in the market and credibility with clients, would-be clients and all other interest groups. Maintaining an efficient website requires methodical web governance and management will to succeed.

About our surveys, and how they work

For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking.

Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility.

Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best.

Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.  

Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control.

We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools called the Web Managers Toolkit, designed to help web teams, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free. All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites.

Technical Data

This survey took place on October 6, 2012 and involved benchmarking nearly a quarter of a million separate URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the Banca Zarattini and Co site, with more than 42,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site tested was HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA.A number of banking websites were excluded from our testing because they use non-accessible technology or have a very small number of pages, which give an unfair comparison with larger sites.

More information

More information (http://www.sitemorse.com/kb.html?q=1266180305) about our surveys and what they test.
For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com