Gomez benchmarks Australian bank web sites

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 06 July 2010 12:45

Business IT - Technology

Australian banks' web sites achieve high availability, but response times are variable, according to the latest Gomez benchmark.

Three of the big four Australian banks achieved a 100% availability rating during June 2010 according to the Gomez Web Performance Benchmark. Gomez is the web performance division of applications performance specialist Compuware.

Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac - along with Adelaide, BankWest, Bendigo, CitiBank, Queensland and Rabobank - all achieved 100% availability in Gomez' testing. However, the study was only concerned with the banks' home pages, not the more important (and more demanding) Internet banking facilities.

ANZ took 14th and last spot, with 99.58% availability. Average availability improved to 99.93% from 99.75%, a "significant improvement" according to company officials.

Considerably more variation was found in the response time results, which ranged from a "standout" 0.177 sec for Westpac to 11.437 sec for Rabobank. Nine banks (Westpac, Adelaide, St George, Macquarie, ANZ, CitiBank, Commonwealth and Bendigo) achieved response times under 2 sec, with NAB just outside at 2.044 sec.

'If it takes more than two seconds to get an online response, customers get frustrated," said Rafi Katanasho, Compuware's solutions director, applications performance management.

What about the variability of response? See page two.