Even for those people who do care about the quality and security of their bank's web services, how many of them are really going to take the time to compare the web services of various banks?
How do you compare them, anyway? It's not like banks give out trial accounts you could use for this purpose.
You'd have to go to the trouble of signing up for a real bank account at each of the banks whose web services you'd like to evaluate. Then spend the time to try them out and compare. So even a cursory inspection of a variety of banks' web services would already be a pretty huge hassle.
Even if you go to all this touble, you're probably not going to know much more than how intuitive a given bank's web interface is, or if they did something glaringly awful in terms of its usability.
You wouldn't know how accessible the interface is under load, or test how well the bank's interface handles the various real-life corner cases you're likely to encounter over time.
And how would you test the interface's security? Is even a reasonably security-aware consumer really going to try breaking in to the bank?
The ironic thing is that most users who use online banking probably do care about the web interface and its security, even if they can't articulate it in so many words. But of them, only a small minority care enough and aware enough of the issues to take the time to comparison shop. And even then they probably won't find out much.
There's an opportunity here for a Consumer Reports style investigation in to the web interfaces of various banks. That would be a valuable service that could save the consumer a lot of time and hassle, and maybe even do things that a lone consumer couldn't: evaluate interface security.
How do you compare them, anyway? It's not like banks give out trial accounts you could use for this purpose.
You'd have to go to the trouble of signing up for a real bank account at each of the banks whose web services you'd like to evaluate. Then spend the time to try them out and compare. So even a cursory inspection of a variety of banks' web services would already be a pretty huge hassle.
Even if you go to all this touble, you're probably not going to know much more than how intuitive a given bank's web interface is, or if they did something glaringly awful in terms of its usability.
You wouldn't know how accessible the interface is under load, or test how well the bank's interface handles the various real-life corner cases you're likely to encounter over time.
And how would you test the interface's security? Is even a reasonably security-aware consumer really going to try breaking in to the bank?
The ironic thing is that most users who use online banking probably do care about the web interface and its security, even if they can't articulate it in so many words. But of them, only a small minority care enough and aware enough of the issues to take the time to comparison shop. And even then they probably won't find out much.
There's an opportunity here for a Consumer Reports style investigation in to the web interfaces of various banks. That would be a valuable service that could save the consumer a lot of time and hassle, and maybe even do things that a lone consumer couldn't: evaluate interface security.