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The new site, found at the personal finance area of http://www.aib.ie, is targeted at the personal banking sector, particularly AIB's 90,000 Internet banking customers in Ireland. Additionally the new site will work as a single portal for a variety of the bank's existing on-line services.
The site includes content relating to day-to-day banking, savings & investments, the home, the family, cars, holidays & travel and students as well as employment and career advice. The different categories will contain features, articles, guides, interactive tools and other relevant financial services.
The site will offer links and resources to AIB's 24hour-online banking service, its share dealing service and connections to Ark Life, the company's life assurance subsidiary.
"We think it will add value to our existing customer base in the Republic of Ireland," said Matt Murray, AIB's Internet marketing manager. He said the service was designed to appeal to customers who were already on-line and might be considering using AIB's existing Internet banking services. "Not everyone in Ireland has Internet access and not everyone wants to bank on-line, so the site is just part of a multi-channel approach to what AIB offers customers."
According to a recent report from Datamonitor, banks that rely exclusively on a single channel, such as the Internet, to serve customer needs may find themselves suffering. Datamonitor said that e-banking remains relatively popular among Net users, but visits to bank branches are still the most commonly used means of banking.
The report predicted that by 2005 over 57 million consumers in six European countries would be banking on-line. But the report stated that the Internet came behind personal visits and the phone as consumers' preferred methods of dealing with banking products. In Germany, for instance, 86 percent of respondents preferred a personal visit, six percent liked to use the phone and five percent preferred the Internet.
"The strategies of many Internet banks were based on the idea that the death of the branch was imminent. However, Datamonitor's research confirms a growing realisation within the e-banking sector that this is not the case," said Alex Boorman, an e-financial services analyst with Datamonitor. "Although branch numbers are still falling, it is now recognised that the branch assumes an important role as part of a bank's multi-channel distribution strategy."
The Internet banking sector in Ireland, like the entire IT sector, has taken its fair share of hits in recent months. Already in the year First-e, the Internet-based bank with operations in Dublin, closed in September with the loss of 245 jobs. That was followed by Bank of Ireland's announcement to close its off-shore Internet bank, Fsharp, earlier this year. Last year AIB itself cancelled plans for its own standalone Internet bank.
Logica and OpenMarket were partners in the development of AIB's new site, which took around six months to complete.
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