Brazilian Banks Preventing Keylogging

"Keylogging" is the term that is becoming used for software programs that sneak onto peoples' computers and then track their keystrokes and report the information back. It is a way for criminals to get, for instance, your bank passwords when you are doing online banking. For the moment, the best most North American banks seem to be offering to prevent it is warning people not to download anything from sources they don't know and trust.

Some Brazilian banks, however, have gone much further. They use programs that display a mini-keyboard on the screen, with keys that appear in different locations on the screen each time, and you enter your passwords by clicking the correct characters on the screen.

If anyone knows of any US banks doing so, please let me know.

Auto Insurance Online research study

We issued our newest research study about auto insurance online today. Here's a link to the news release . You can also download the executive summary from the research page of our website.

It looks as though the bar has been raised since we did a similar study in 2004. Overall, the sites are better, and people perceive that the prices they are being quoted online are betterrelative to the competition than they did in 2004.

But there have been big shifts in the relative standings. I don't want to say publicly who's tumbled (my goal is to encourage emprovement with a carrot, not a stick!). But I can say that two sites stood out as being particularly good in our testers' eyes: Esurance and Progressive.

A couple of other interesting findings:

1. Home page design is important to getting people to continue, but great home page design is not enough to win kudos if it isn't followed up with a simple, easy-to-use, error-free process.
2. Ease of use is as or more important than pricing in getting site users to recommend the site to others (or to come back and use it themselves).

Viral Marketing attempt: AIG

AIG's auto insurance page (OCA Home) encourages users to "Start spreading the news", telling them they can save their friends $346. It makes an interesting appeal to "safe drivers" to "stick together" in order to keep prices lower, suggesting that by getting more safe drivers among AIG customers, all will benefit with lower prices.

Interesting marketing twist. Unfortunately, they miss much of the impact of the appeal by not having a link you can click to "spread the news".

Car Insurance - credit scoring

We're putting the finishing touches on our 2006 update study on automobile insurance online. Two of the biggest complaints we hear from consumers are that they don't see why they are asked for permission to have a credit check done, and why they have to provide Social Security Numbers.

I suspect the SSN request is to facilitate the credit checking. This article [ Car Insurance ] gives good insight into the question about credit checks.

Website compares shipping rates

Website compares shipping rates

Interesting idea: side-by-side comparisons of shipping costs. Would be very useful for self-published authors and folks who run smallish websites that have to ship products. (They should market their service to e-Bay vendors!

Aeroplan needs help

I recently signed up to get my Aeroplan statements online. So today I get my "July Statement notification". It is 99% advertising, but does mention my mileage balance, and a link to click for "statement details". I wanted to see if recent flights had been added, so I clicked for the details. That took me to an ad, that was supposed to end after 15 seconds, but didn't. The first time I clicked to get past it, I got a page error. The second time it took me to a log in screen, where I had to remember and enter my Aeroplan number. And then.... The "statement" contained no more details than the original e-mail had. There does not seem to be any obvious way on it to get the details of which flights were included!