Diner's Club the Leader in Speed and Reliability on Keynote's New Credit Card Web Transaction Performance Index

Business Wire, Oct 19, 2004

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN)

A[micro]   --  Nine Leading Credit Card Sites Kick-Off New Index; Diner's
        Club Tops First Week's Index with 100% Reliability

A[micro]   --  Transaction Speeds Vary; Transaction Reliability More
        Consistent

A[micro]   --  13% of U.S. Consumers Now Pay Credit Card Bills Online

A[micro]   --  New Index Adds to Keynote's Existing Family of Financial
        Services Indices that Already Includes Online Broker and
        Banking Indices

A[micro]   --  Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for Credit Card Sites
        also Available

Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), announced inaugural results of the world's first e-business transaction index for the credit card industry. Known as "The Keynote Credit Card Web Transaction Performance Index," the new index provides an excellent benchmark for transaction speed and reliability of leading credit card Web sites.

With the official launch of Keynote's new credit card Web transaction index, Keynote has built a strong foundation of Web performance indices across the financial services market. Keynote already offers market-leading Web transaction indices for the online broker and banking industries. No other vendor offers three distinct Web transaction indices designed specifically to meet the needs of financial services organizations in these important and growing online categories.

Sites currently on the new index are bankone.com, capitalone.com, chase.com, citibank.com, dinersclubnorthamerica.com, discovercard.com, firstusa.com, mbna.com and providian.com.

The initial results from Keynote's Credit Card Transaction performance index showed a wide range of performance for some of the largest credit card issuers' Web sites. Companies that issue credit cards have discovered the efficiencies that online access for their customers can bring to their operations -- everything from checking available credit to viewing recent charges online allows the phone support to focus on more customer issues.

Speeds for checking the recent charges varied from around 7 seconds to over 20 seconds. Often times, these sites are slowed down while authenticating the user's credentials or doing the actual database queries for the recent charges. Those sites that can optimize the performance of these two critical processes would stand to gain in speed. The success rates for completing the task to check the recent charges are extremely close to each other with the top 5 sites being separated by less than one percent, indicating that most credit card issuers have a robust enough infrastructure that supports 24X7 access. The remaining sites could benefit greatly if they reviewed their infrastructure and implemented best practices that would increase the transaction reliability of their sites.

Here are inaugural results for The Keynote Credit Card Web Transaction Performance Index:

Week of October 4, 2004, 8:00 a.m. to midnight eastern time:
       TRANSACTION SPEED                 TRANSACTION RELIABILITY
Rank       Site       Speed    Rank              Site     Reliability
                    (seconds)                              (percent)

1    Diners Club       7.03    1     Diners Club           100.00
2    Capital One       8.20    2     Chase                  99.82
3    Providian         9.14    3     Providian              99.73
4    Discover Card    11.66    4     Discover Card          99.37
5    Bank One         12.27    5     Bank One               99.01
     KEYNOTE INDEX    12.75    6     MBNA                   98.84
6    First USA        13.00          KEYNOTE INDEX          98.69
7    Chase            15.48    7     First USA              98.64
8    MBNA             16.82    8     Citibank               96.50
9    Citibank         20.62    9     Capital One            96.39

Increasing numbers of Americans are taking advantage of offerings by credit card providers to receive, view and pay credit card charges online. An April 2004 Yankee Group report found that 13% of U.S. consumers pay their credit card bills online and 14% receive and view their statements online. Therefore, it is increasingly important for e-business executives within credit card companies to understand, on a real time 24/7 basis, the overall health of their e-business infrastructure.

"As more people use credit cards to pay for goods and services online, the risk of other people gaining access to credit card information not their own and making unauthorized purchases online has also increased," said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst in Keynote's public services division. "Rather than wait for their monthly credit card statements, more people are going to the Web sites run by their credit card providers to make sure there have been no unauthorized charges during the month. And of course consumers are increasingly paying their credit card bills online. It is imperative that credit card companies have a deep understanding for the operational performance of their site so they can continually improve it. Our new index is designed to serve this need."