Bank of America was the overall winner with 16 Monitor Awards while Fidelity Investments followed with nine “Best of Breed” prizes in the 2009 edition of Corporate Insight’s annual review of the online offerings of more than 70 financial services firms.
Corporate Insight, a New York-based provider of competitive intelligence to the financial services industry, evaluated online offerings such as account information and security, educational content, transactional capabilities in the banking, brokerage, credit card, annuity, mutual fund and mutual fund advisor businesses.
Companies receiving the highest number of Corporate Insight Gold Monitor Awards in their respective award categories were:
- Advisor Category: American Funds, MFS
- Annuity Category: John Hancock
- Bank Category: Bank of America
- Credit Card Category: Bank of America
- e-Monitor Category: E*Trade Financial, Fidelity
- Mutual Fund Category: Fidelity
American Funds and MFS received the greatest number of overall Mutual Fund Advisor Awards. BlackRock, Capital One and SunTrust, which were added to the competition for the first time in 2009, received Monitor Awards for unique offerings in several categories.
The mutual fund industry embraced social media in 2009, Corporate Insight said. Vanguard, American Century, Putnam, Franklin Templeton and other fund companies are using Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, blogs and third-party networking and social bookmarking sites to interact with investors and advisors, within FINRA guidelines.
Several firms introduced new applications, websites and text-based services. Chase, Citibank, E*Trade and KeyBank introduced mobile programs for the iPhone, while Wells Fargo introduced an application for BlackBerry. Corporate Insight expects the banking industry to invest heavily in wireless capabilities in 2010.
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