Banking Review

Will security fears kill off CBA’s online banking ambitions?

The bankers running Australia’s most actively used online banking service believe their latest upgrade puts them “years ahead” of the competition.

With the Commonwealth Bank already well down the path towards deploying its new core banking platform, Drew Unsworth, head of online banking & sales, told Online Banking Review “They will have to do a lot of hard work just to get to where we are today, even assuming we do nothing, and you can’t assume we’re going to do nothing.”

Having connected its CommSee, CommInsure and Comsec platforms the bank can get on with the job of tapping its 4.4 million strong Internet banking user base for increased value.

We’ve got more on the bank’s new offering and future plans in the upcoming issue of Online Banking Review, out June 12.

We’re also very fortunate to have Drew Unsworth presenting at our June 25 conference on Customer Experience Excellence in Financial Services.

The bank has been heavily promoting its new online banking offering via an outdoor and online advertising campaign. Unfortunately this opportunity hasn’t been missed by criminals who have been heavily bombarding Australians with phishing attacks at the same time.

The fraudsters have used a wide range of social engineering hooks including user surveys, credit refund offers, and in some cases requests to fix expired accounts by calling compromised telephone numbers and sharing credit card details.

This is not the first time fraudsters have timed their onslaughts with an upgrade or new deployment. Suncorp experienced similar problems when it first deployed two-factor authentication.

The problem is the scale – given the larger number of spam emails making their way through filters and the equally large number of Australians using NetBank, it’s inevitable some people will get stung. And the impact this has on the industry’s ability to grow overall Internet banking usage cannot be underestimated.

The Commonwealth Bank says it is growing Internet banking users at the rate of 60,000 per month, with an active user base of more than 2.5 million. But given it has 7.7 million customers, and 4.4 million registered for Internet banking, it has a way to go to convert those not yet using it. And security fears are the number one issue consistently highlighted in research on why more customers aren’t online.

Are banks, ISPs and regulators doing enough to address the ongoing problem of phishing? Two-factor authentication has reduced fraud levels, but what about the very real impact the problem is having on hesitant online banking users? Can you put a price on consumer confidence?