Availability of banking on mobile Web increases: Gomez

By Chris Harnick

October 20, 2009

Search benchmarks

Gomez’s September benchmark study found no company in either the banking, search or airline mobile sector received a perfect score of five bars.

Last month, three businesses scored a perfect score for the first time in Gomez’s benchmark studies: Bank of America, American Airlines and Northwest Airlines. However, this month mobile banking increased in availability while airline and search numbers fell.

“Unlike last month, this month not a single company achieved five bars,” said Arthur Mateos, general manager of emerging technology at Gomez, Lexington, MA.

“This means that the companies are becoming more competitive with each other, and that this month there were no companies in any category capable of besting their peers across all five dimensions of discoverability, readiness, availability, performance, and consistency,” he said.

The performance benchmarks from Gomez and dotMobi take into account different aspects of mobile Web performance.

Banking benchmarks

Search benchmarks
AOL and Google topped the search category charts with an overall score of four bars out of five.

While Google ranked high in readiness and discoverability it faltered in availability and only reached 98.53 percent with Amazon the highest at 99.77 percent.

Amazon also beat Google when it came to response time and consistency.

Airline benchmarks

Compare Amazon’s 3.18 seconds response time and 2.73 seconds consistency time to Google’s 3.55 seconds response time and 2.79 seconds consistency time.

But the online retailer stumbled when it came to readiness and discoverability, receiving only a three for readiness and a four for discoverability.

Ask.com ranked the lowest in overall score, availability and consistency.

Banking benchmarks
When it came to the banking industry, Bank of America and Wells Fargo both received four bars overall, while Chase, U.S. Bank and Washington Mutual all got two out of five bars.

Bank of America’s mobile discoverability was ranked at five, the highest of the bunch. On the other hand, Washington Mutual received a 0.5 discoverability rating.

However, Washington Mutual bested the other financial institutions when it came to availability. It scored 99.86 percent.

“Mobile banking showed much better availability on average than both airlines and search, with an average availability of 99.73 percent,” Mr. Mateos said. “Airlines and search availability [average] numbers did not even crack 99 percent. 

“Being down 1 percent of the time equates to being down for 7.2 hours in one month, or almost one working day,” he said.

Airline benchmarks
For airlines, the juggernaut to beat is still JetBlue.

JetBlue ranked a four out five total, 2.5 bars for discoverability, a four when it came to readiness, 99.74 percent availability, had an average response time of 3.01 seconds  and a consistency time of 1.85 seconds.

U.S. Airways ranked a one out of five in the overall score, but a five when it came to readiness.

While the average was below 99 percent, Southwest, Northwest, JetBlue, Delta, Continental and American Airlines all received greater than a 99 percent availability rating.

Mr. Mateos said that competition appears to be tightening as companies recognize the need for a good mobile Web experience. 

“Banks, in particular, recognize that having a highly available mobile presence is critical to business success,” Mr. Mateos said. “Search and airlines need to work on core issues of reliability to improve the availability of their mobile Web applications.”