America Online Inc trumpeted the founding of its new on-line banking service last week. AOL Teams Up With Eighteen Respected Financial Institutions to Bring Home Banking to Members, was how it put it. However, the company’s general manager of personal finance David Bard admits the move is little more than America Online adding buttons to its browser to take its users to banks’ existing Web sites. The value we are adding is the value of the packaging he said – a claim that could also be made by anyone who puts lots of banking links on their home page. To be fair, America Online is ensuring that when its Web browser launches it will be branded with the Bank’s logo. Bard said that only a handful of the institutions were launching new services with America Online, the rest were pre-existing.
