RIGA, Latvia, 12 October 2009 – Findings of the Baltic E-Banking Report 2009, an annual study examining e-banking services offered by Baltic banks to residential customers, were presented by Metasite during the 15th Baltic Financial Forum in Riga.

Evaluation of smartphone-enabled mobile banking experience was introduced into the long-running study this year. A summary of the report’s findings is available for downloading on Metasite website.

As usual the full version of the 300+ pages report is offered by Metasite to banks, academic institutions, research organizations and other interested parties throughout the Baltics.

What is the Baltic E-Banking Report?

The 2009 Baltic E-Banking Report is the 7th annual independent e-banking study covering all retail banks in all three Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The 2009 Baltic E-Banking Report analyzes the strengths and weaknesses in every Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian retail bank’s internet offerings, benchmarking every individual bank against its peers and comparing the 2009 testing results with those of 2008, thus evaluating progress made during the last 12 months.

The report is based on testing of over 500 criteria grouped into five categories:

• functionality of the available e-banking systems (what users can or cannot do online)
• clarity of every bank’s e-banking offerings (whether bank websites and e-banking systems are sufficiently easy to understand; how hard is it for the users to find the information they need)
• convenience of the internet banking systems (are they really easy to use for frequent visitors)
• responsiveness of every bank’s online customer service (how fast and well the banks are providing responses to customer inquiries submitted via email)
• benchmarking of available mobile banking offerings

The report provides comparative analysis of over 42000 data points. 39 banks have been covered in the 2009 report – 12 retail banks in Lithuania, 17 in Latvia and 10 in Estonia. Baltic E-Banking Report remains the largest, deepest and longest-running study of this kind in the Baltic states.