MARCH 5, 2000

A Highly-Rated Financial Site Was Built the People’s Way

Look and Feel of Branches Goes Online

BRIDGEPORT, CONN.
It’s easy to build a good Internet site if you listen to your customers. That’s how People’s Bank built one of the top-rated sites in the financial services industry.

People’s started with a state-of-the-art custom-built infrastructure. But just as a Porsche isn’t a Porsche without its distinctive body style, peoples.com had to have the look and feel of one of the bank’s 146 bricks-and-mortar branches, and that’s where the People’s people came in.

“We talk to customers, we have focus groups, we have usability standards,” says Ted Josephson, People’s vice president, manager, Direct Banking, who heads up the online development team.

“Our focus was to have a system that is safe, reliable and easy to use,” says Carol Anderson, People’s vice president, Information Systems. Anderson’s team worked with IBM to develop high-level systems architecture, which enabled People’s to extend to the Internet the systems it uses for managing banking, investment and credit card accounts in its 146 branches and 220 ATMs.

The results of their efforts? peoples.com was just rated among the top five in a study of 172 financial services Web sites representing companies in the United States, Canada and Latin America.

In the study, conducted by Atlanta-based Speer & Associates, Inc., People’s ranked ahead of such well-known companies as Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments, PaineWebber, First Union, Key Corp., Wells Fargo and HSBC. People’s was the only United States company of its size to make the S & A study’s top 25.