Why Banks Are Ditching ‘.com’ for Bank

`Bank’ Domain – Consumer Protection

With over 4,000 registrations in the U.S for web address, European banks have been making haste in acquiring the more secured domain name `bank; where more than 500 European financial organizations have signed to take advantage of this special domain. According to the chief executive of domain name seller, CentralNic, the reason is `consumer protection.

Ben Crawford informed CNBC that the reason for the `bank’ domain is basically that the millions of dollars which are lost annually are through online fraud’. Several banks together with the popular establishments in recent yearshave seen breaks in their network inclusive of JPMorgan in 2014 when the bank had revealed that some 76 million household together with seven million small businesses had their data conceded by cyber-attack.

Besides this, a report of 2014 by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies projected that the cybercrime costs the global economy over $400 billion each year. The domain name `bank’ is only made available to banks and hence it gives consumers the security of knowing that if they tend to get to a website which ends with `bank’, it is not a bogus website, it is not deceptive and it can be trusted.

`CentralNic – Support Financial Institutions

In order to avail one of these domain names, it is said that banks are paying about $1,500 which is higher than the standard consumer name of domain. The role of CentralNic in the procedure is to render support to financial institutions in order to go through the compliancy issues, in obtaining the new domain name while `bank’ seems to be operated by fTLD Registry Services.

Moreover, CentralNic also seems to have some contribution in the launch of Google’s Alphabet website `abc.xyz’ Entrepreneur. The owner of `xyz’ is Daniel Negari though CentralNic is the exclusive wholesaler for `xyz’ which helps in powering the domain’s registry. Registrations on `xyz’, according to Reuters had increased intensely since the announcement from Google with Crawford adding the `xyz’ being the only contender to the future `.com’.Customers are being compelled to seek alternative options of banking due to bank fees and low interest rates. But will going `bank-free’, provide the answer to these problems?

`Credit Union/Money Market Mutual Funds

To know if the world could do without a bank, it is essential to determine how the changes have taken place in banking and if those changes are friendly or not to the consumers. Co-owner of Money Crashers, Andrew Schrage states that several people seem to be ditching their banks.

 He further commented that over 5.6 million Americans have closed their accounts with the big banks and among those consumers; around 214,000 had opened new accounts with a credit union. With the increase in bank fees, low interest rates accompanied with poor customer service at several of the large banking institution, people seem to be unhappy.

Schrage informs that two of the best alternatives to bank in keeping your funds in place where it could gain a return are credit unions as well as money market mutual funds. The interest rate, for instance, offered on credit union accounts are usually on the higher side than those offered by most banks, and the fees seems much lower.

Money market mutual funds also seem to be a good alternative which is an investment in short term certificates of deposit or securities. These could be in the form of Treasury bills, government bonds or corporate bonds.