Geneva-based Banque Bénédict Hentsch and one of Switzerland’s oldest banks, Sparkasse Schwyz, jointly top the latest Sitemorse benchmark of the Swiss banking sector having both scored more than eight out of ten possible marks for their websites.

Wealth management specialists Bénédict Hentsch have only been around since 2004, but their website has risen five places in the survey since we last looked at the sector in the second quarter of the year. Our automated testing scored their site very highly on functionality and performance.

Sparkasse Schwyz celebrate their 200th birthday in 2012 so have been around a lot longer, but they have improved their website for the anniversary to represent “A modern, fresh appearance for a bank with tradition”. Our tests rated them highly on function, code quality and performance.

Our quarterly review of the websites of just over 200 banks in this sector found that around seven per cent were classed as ‘error-free’ by our methodology, a high score compared to other sectors such as retail or FTSE companies.

Sitemorse conducts regular surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website.

Also scoring highly were Lausanne and Lugano-based Banque de Dépôts et de gestion, with 8.19 out of 10 and Esparniskasse Speicher, based in the Swiss municipality of Speicher, with 8.09. Banque Cramer’s site scored very highly on accessibility.

Since our last survey in Q4 2011, several banks have climbed the table rapidly – one, Aargauische Kantonalbank, has risen from near the bottom of the table to claim 9th position – a rise of 211 places. Rapid rises can happen when an organisation launches a new, more efficient site. Other high climbers include Banque Morval, up 107 places, and SG Private Banking (Suisse) SA, up 101.

At the other end of the scale, fallers this time are headed by Schaffhauser Kantonalbank, down 185 places taking them to 209th in the table, Banque Syz and Co SA, down 148 and Medibank, down 142. Schaffhauser Kantonalbank also has the dubious distinction of being the slowest site tested, 22 seconds on average by load time. Other slow performers in this sector are BBVA (Suiza) SA, VZ Depotbank AG and Barclays Bank (Suisse) SA.

Despite accessibility of websites being very much still a hot item and backed by law within Europe, nearly 40 of the banking sites tested fail accessibility tests on every page. Some of the best sites in this chart for accessibility, however, manage to pass on every page.

Sitemorse concluded: Given that the websites of Swiss banks are mostly shop-windows for their services rather than transactional in nature, the sites are often fairly small and simple in structure which may account for their higher-than normal efficiency, but our research found the top 100 or so in the table to have higher scores than normal in other sectors. Very often having a large amount of legacy data on a company’s web presence makes them more vulnerable to simple errors such as non-working links or missing images.

About our surveys, and how they work

For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking.

Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility.

Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best.

Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.

Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control.

We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites.

Technical Data

This survey took place on July 17, 2012 and involved benchmarking nearly a quarter of a million separate URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the Banca Zarattini and Co site, with more than 42,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site tested was HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA.

• For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com

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