October 13 , 2009

Who do our banks compete with online?
Hitwise shows how Canadian banks fare

Last week, nearly half (47%) of visits to According to a blog post from Hitwise, banks and financial institutions websites came from other Banks and Financial Institutions websites and 58% went to other sites in the same category. These figures may seem staggering but keep in mind, part of this is traffic moving among websites of the same brand (i.e. the main home page, banking and brokerage). However, much of that is also traffic coming from and going to competitive sites.

The amount of traffic going to and from competing sites varies dramatically from bank to bank. For example, most of BMO Financial Group Online Banking's traffic goes to other BMO sites with 50% going to www.bmo.com last week. By comparison, CIBC Online Banking sends a much larger proportion of its traffic to non-CIBC websites, with only 3.7% going to CIBC Online Brokerage closely followed by TD Canada Trust Online Banking at 3.38% and RBC Online Bank at 2.6%.

Below is a table of the top 10 downstream competitors from the big five banks. I used the online banking websites of the big five (online banking gets the most traffic). The downstream brands are listed, rather than individual URLs so that you can see the top 10 competing brands. In most cases, there were multiple websites for each brand (such as TD Canada Trust Online Banking and TD Waterhouse).