Dot-bank: what next?

• Author: Hershberger, Tara
• Position: SOCIAL & DIGITAL MEDIA - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

JUNE 23, 2015, will go down in banking history as the day the flood gates opened for new domain names.

General Availability was the day that banks could begin, at no small cost, to secure website domains ending in dot-bank (.bank). It was a first come, first serve competition serving customers worldwide. This of course, was preceded by a time frame, called the Sunrise Period, where trademark holders could register the exact name of their registered trademark, so long as they were registered in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers's (ICANN's) Trademark Clearing House.

Did you secure the name or names that you wanted? Some banks are heeding advice to get as many domains as they can afford across a variety of Generic Top Level Domains (gTLD's) such as, .loan, .mortgage, .creditcard, and .savings, each with their own release dates. Local TLDs, such as .newyork are also becoming available adding to the medley of options. After all is said and done, the original TLDs (.com, .biz, .edu, .org, etc.), which totaled less than 25 in 2014, will have ballooned to more than 1,000!

These new dot-bank domains are more trusted, protected, more secure and more easily identifiable. In a recent survey sent to members of the banking community:

* Sixty-four percent feel that a dot-bank domain will be important for the security of the industry.

* Eighty percent expressed a high interest in dot-bank after reading the description and values presented in the survey.

* Eighty-five percent said that a higher level of security will be a key factor in their purchase decision.

What's a bank to do? The million-dollar question now facing banks is what to do with their dot-bank domain.

Park it

Dot-bank domains do not need to be activated right away. Banks can continue to use their existing dot-com domains indefinitely. Some banks may take the "wait and see" approach. There are so many more questions than answers at this time regarding the implications of using the new dot-bank domain. Paramount is the concern of whether or not consumers will embrace the dot-bank domain. A wait and see approach may be beneficial for smaller asset-size banks with fewer resources. Domain-specific searches are already available on Google yet are rarely used.

The scope of a change to a new domain is monumental and includes marketing, communication, compliance and disclosures. Advice abounds on the Internet warning not to change your domain unless you absolutely must. This...