OMAHA, Neb. – One of the big guns in Internet banking has launched a new service that hands the keys to the digital dashboard over to the clients, and Tim Mogler says that makes his job easier. Mogler is the Internet marketing specialist at $314 million Centris Federal Credit Union in Omaha, Neb., one of two credit unions that beta tested Digital Insight's new Web Center and went live with the platform in mid-March. Web Center allows credit union staffers to edit and update content on their Web site and post the changes live, instead of having it done by the vendor. “It's made my job easier just because managing the Web site is now so much quicker and we can do so much more. There's no lag time in submitting pages and having them load it for us,” Mogler says. Mogler says the 10-branch, 58,500-member credit union already has been using the system to improve its communication with members through its Web site at www.centrisfcu.org. “We can schedule when we want to post new rates, for instance,” he says. “Last Friday, I put new rates in and then had them post on Monday. That's one example. We can also put Amber Alerts on our site or let our members know, say, when an ATM is back in service at one of our branches.” The Web Center content tools offer a Microsoft Word-like WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing interface, and the system overall is designed to be used by people without deep knowledge of the HTML (hypertext markup language) code that's actually driving the changes, says Will Detterman, senior product manager at Digital Insight in Calabasas, Calif. Mogler notes that some HTML knowledge helps flatten the learning curve for using Web Center. “I found it to be fairly easy to learn,” he says, “but it might not be so easy for people not used to HTML and other things like that. But it's really very intuitive and I would think they could pick it up very fast.” The Web Center platform takes the credit union staffer making the changes through several steps, such as work and preview areas, before they are posted through the DI servers. The new system also offers expanded reporting functions such as session and page usage, search engine and browser stats, and click-stream analysis, Detterman says. “Click-stream analysis helps you know where people are running into problems with your Web page. For instance, maybe PDF files are too big and taking too long to download and you can see people are abandoning them,” the DI product manager says. Web Center also offers a rollback feature that allows a credit union to retrieve exactly what was on the site at a given point in the past, useful for both disaster recovery and audit requests, Detterman says. Audit logs also keep track of all administrative functions performed at the site. Mogler at Centris says, “A nice thing about it is that if I had to, I could go to a PC anywhere else and be able to access the site, which is kind of a nice disaster recovery option to have.” Mogler says being a beta site for Web Center had its benefits, too. “We probably got as much or more as anyone will from this,” he says. “We got to help with the design of a lot of things and give our input in a lot of other ways. It was interesting, too, because a lot of this was really new to everybody.” Indeed, developing a product that simplifies matters for its customers was a complex process for DI, Detterman says. “We combined back-end server maintenance kinds of things with basic hardware control and security tools, along with content management tools,” he says. “Some of it was third party, such as the WYSIWYG content editor, but we did all the integration work ourselves.” Digital Insight (www.digitalinsight.com) provides Internet banking services to about 1,400 financial services organizations, about half of them credit unions. -

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