NAB website often slow

As if it hadn't had enough bad news, NAB has racked up another set of poor numbers, coming in at the bottom of the Big Four banks for website performance.

According to Compuware's Gomez Australian Banking and Insurance Industry Benchmarks, both the NAB and its subsidiary, UBank, had online response times below the banking industry average for the month to December 1, 2010.  Westpac, which led the sector, had response times more than 11 times faster than NAB's and a 100 per cent uptime record.

Compuware is not able to tease out internet response times for the period NAB endured its core systems failure, but its likely response times during that part of the month were much worse that the month's average as people flocked online to check their accounts. Several times over the last week NAB has been forced to apologise for slower than usual website performance.

NAB's website is currently attracting 170 million visitors a year, and dealing with 100 million online transactions a year, worth A$250 billion. But customer satisfaction is seriously impaired by sluggish websites. According to the Aberdeen Group research firm, a one-second delay in response time for web users has, in the past, led to a 16 per cent drop in customer satisfaction.

For the month to 1 December, Westpac performed best of all the banks, with a 0.274 second response time. The next slot went to Macquarie, although it was already considerably slower at 1.033 seconds.

Commonwealth was in eighth slot at 1.627 seconds, and ANZ in ninth at 1.881 seconds. The average for the sector was 2.504 seconds.

NAB, meanwhile, was ranked a sluggish 3.21 seconds, and its online-only subsidiary, UBank, was even worse at 3.329 seconds.

To put this in perspective, the bank's response time was worse than the top 16 online retailers in Australia and only marginally faster than Officeworks' website.