Speaker: Ferdinand Feola, SVP, CTO, The Dime Bank
What factors impacted your bank's decision to move to .Bank?
Ferdinand Feola: Hi, I'm Ferdinand Feola, the senior vice president and chief technology officer at the at The Dime Bank. We chose to use a dot Bank domain name for several important reasons. The first being enhanced security, the dot bank domain includes mandatory and stringent authentication. It reduces cyber risk and threats. We wanted to increase trust and credibility and we felt by implementing the dime dot bank domain, it would comfort our customers and consumers that we're a trusted financial institution. We also wanted brand differentiation and recognition and we went from the dimebank.com to thedime.bank It just sounds better. It helped our customers be able to differentiate us from non financial entities, and make it easier to identify us as a, as a community bank. We're in a highly regulated environment as you know, and only verified financial institutions can register at .Bank So we don't have to worry as much about spoofing our domain and those kind of things. And this regulation helps maintain a high level of integrity and trust, trustworthiness. We wanted to increase consumer protection. The .Bank domain contributes to protecting our consumers from fraud scams like phishing and smishing and vishing. This confidence is what we want to convey to the communities we serve by adopting the .Bank domain. We at the Dime Bank feel we've demonstrated our commitment to security, trust and consumer protection, which are all critical factors to us in today's financial age.
What does the move to .Bank mean to your bank?
Ferdinand Feola: The .Bank domain means increased security, improved marketing and improved customer recognition.
What is your advice to banks considering the move to .Bank?
Ferdinand Feola: We decided when we did our implementation to make sure that we had a roadmap to include everything from uh statements, anything on paper, business cards, et cetera that we use for marketing that had our old domain name uh and, and gear up to be able to transition those. We also wanted to know any systems that we had that were sending emails on our behalf. We retained as part of our email record, our old domain so old emails will not be lost, but we didn't want to have any technical hiccups for our customers and for internal staff. And so we took it slowly and methodically. We got help from fTLD. We got help from our office 365 provider and we got some help from our core provider as well. We wanted to make sure that we, I learned on the experiences of banks who had come before us.
