The new .bank domain name opened for availability in June of last year, and while its security benefits were shouted from the rooftops, not a whole lot of banks moved over to the domain name – at least not yet.

“Our clients are definitely registering their names, so they’re securing their spot, so to speak. But I don’t know any of my clients that have implemented it or rolled it out,” said Gerald R. Gagne, a member of the firm Wolf & Co.

Bankers have good reason to consider the .bank domain name instead of sticking with a general top-level domain, he said. The new domain name has enhanced security requirements not similarly required of general domain names, and .bank is available only to verified members of the banking community.

“The advantages to moving to a .bank domain are that it helps remove the risk of bank customers accessing a spoofed site because .bank domains can only be purchased by banks. Bank ownership is vetted during the process of obtaining the domain,” said Anneliese Gast, manager of web services and bank solutions at Fiserv.

But whether it’s for branding reasons or otherwise, few banks have actually made the leap to .bank.

Through the end of July, 2,594 banks nationwide had purchased a total of 5,253 domain names, according to Craig Schwartz, the managing director of fTLD Registry Services, a private entity established by various trade groups to operate the .bank and .insurance domain names.

“Historically, on average, banks have purchased about 2.1 domains per bank,” he said. “Some have purchased many more and it might be for the purposes of brand protection for key product names or service names. For much smaller banks, we generally see them registering one.”

But of those who have registered one or more domain names, just 170 have actually migrated over to .bank, Schwartz said.

“I don’t know if it has to do with branding. If they’ve already spent a lot of money branding a certain way, that could be it,” Gagne remarked. “But bankers are slow to move and when they do move, they tend to move all together.”

Migration Versus Marketing

Locally, the $459 million Mansfield Bank has already secured its new domain name and is planning to shift later this year, said Joseph Parisi, vice president of marketing.

“The larger reason for moving is cybersecurity and that is a major plank in our customer protection platform,” he told Banker & Tradesman.

Mutual Bank in Whitman also secured its .bank domain name, said Marketing Director Christine Grundy. The $460 million institution purchased a domain name in the first round of reservations and recently renewed it, she said.

But while the .bank transition is a priority for Mansfield Bank, Mutual Bank is happy enough just to have secured its spot.

“It’s a big project to transition, not made easy by the fact that the very features that make dot-bank secure also prohibit setting up a redirect from our existing dot-com site. And we haven’t felt any downside to the status quo,” Grundy said via email. “Converting is on our long-term agenda, but not a front-burner item.”

Schwartz says that’s one of the most common misperceptions about switching to the .bank domain name.

“One of those misperceptions is that the migration is difficult, that it’s time consuming, challenging and expensive, and we’ve heard from a number of banks that have said the process was far simpler than they ever would have expected and in some cases less expensive than the process of acquiring the .bank domain names themselves,” he said. “It’s not as hard as banks think, but it does take planning and the allocation of resources and coordination.”

That entails developing a coordinated plan and working closely with various departments within the bank to make sure that legal, marketing and IT are all on the same page. Banks should also make sure their core processors can support the .bank domain name.

Gast notes that Fiserv has let its customers know it can support the new domain name and said that it’s a good idea to give any vendors supporting the bank’s website as much lead time as possible.

Schwartz said he anticipates a greater movement toward .bank throughout 2017, and he wants banks to think about the new domain name as a competitive advantage. It tells the general public, in a simpler way, that the bank cares about the safety of their customers’ personal information.

“You can tell people about your servers and your firewalls, but the average person is not going to understand that level of detail,” he said. “If you can talk about what .bank means and what it provides, it’s an easier story to tell.”