Download The Communications Guide

A big part of migrating to .BANK, and benefiting from its added security, is educating your customers, employees and vendors about your move so they’re comfortable with the transition and understand what it means for them. This guide will provide you with appropriate steps and templates based on the best practices from over 500 banks that have already made the move to .BANK.

When: We recommend beginning to educate customers, employees and vendors about one month ahead of launch.

How: Most banks find that the following forms of communication are successful in informing and educating their communities about their move. (Numbers correspond to the relevant templates below)

1. ‘.com’ Announcement Bar or Homepage Banner: “On MM/YY we will move our website to ABC123.BANK for an even more secure banking experience. Click here to learn more.” (With “here” linking to our Customer FAQ template on your site)
   1. Announcement Bars are an unobtrusive, easy way to add a one or two sentence message across the top of your website, notifying customers of your upcoming move to .BANK, with a click-through to our Customer FAQ*.
   2. Homepage Banners enable you to provide more information about your move to .BANK than an ‘Announcement Bar’, and would also click-through to our Customer FAQ*. We recommend a single homepage banner over ‘sliders’ for attention purposes and to reduce load time.
2. Pre-launch .BANK Educational Emails:

   Customers:

   [Customer]- We’re excited to announce that on MM/DD/YY we’ll transition over to ABC123.BANK from our ABC123.com domain to provide you an even more secure banking experience. On that day all visits to ABC123.com will be automatically redirected to ABC123.BANK, and all emails will be forwarded from our ABC123.com addresses to our new ABC123.BANK addresses. While website redirection and email forwarding will remain in place for the foreseeable future, you should take a moment after our launch on MM/DD to update your bookmark(s) to our site and any email addresses in your address book.

   Our new .BANK domain helps to prevent phishing attacks against our employees, customers and vendors by providing a visual identification cue for our emails and websites. Going forward, you should authenticate our emails and website(s) simply by looking for the “.BANK” (rather than .com) at the end of our email addresses and at the end of our URL. If it’s not .BANK it’s not us.

   You can learn more about .BANK Security here: https://www.register.BANK/customerFAQ

   The security of your assets and information continues to be our top priority, we love being your bank, knowing the needs of the community and our customers, while ensuring you have the security you’d expect from a much bigger bank.

   Employees:

   We’re excited to announce that on MM/DD/YY we’ll transition over to ABC123.BANK from our ABC123.com domain to provide our customers an even more secure banking experience. On that day all visits to ABC123.com will be automatically redirected to ABC123.BANK, and all emails will be forwarded from our ABC123.com addresses to our new ABC123.BANK addresses. While website redirection and email forwarding will remain in place for the foreseeable future, you should encourage customers to update their bookmark(s) to our site and any email addresses in their address book.

   Optional [Please take a moment to share this news with customers you interact with, letting them know that we’ll be moving on MM/DD/YY for enhanced security, and that more information can be found on our website. (You may also want to print out our Customer FAQ for your employees to distribute.)]

   Our new .BANK domain helps to prevent phishing attacks against our employees, customers and vendors by providing a visual identification cue for our emails and websites. Going forward, our emails and website(s) can be authenticated simply by looking for the “.BANK” (rather than .com) at the end of our email addresses and at the end of our URL. After we launch please remind and encourage customers to “Look for the .BANK” before engaging with emails from us or logging into their online accounts on our website.

   You can learn more about .BANK Security here: https://www.register.BANK/customerFAQ

3. Email Responder Post-Launch:
   • Alias/New .BANK Addresses w/ Forwarding: “Thank you for your email. Our bank has moved to www.ABC123.BANK for even more secure online banking and email communications (read more here). Your email has been forwarded to my new email address which is: FriendlyBanker@ABC123.BANK. Please look for the ‘.BANK’ at the end of my email address in all future emails, and update your address book accordingly.”
   • New Address w/o Forwarding: “Thank you for your email. Our bank has moved to www.ABC123.BANK for even more secure online banking and email communications (read more here). The email address you sent this email to is no longer active, please contact me at: FriendlyBanker@ABC123.BANK. Please look for the ‘.BANK’ at the end of my email address in all future emails, and update your address book accordingly.”
4. Email Signature: “You may have noticed my email address now ends in ‘.BANK’ rather than ‘[.com]’, this is a security feature to help prevent phishing as only banks can get ‘.BANK’ domains. Please look for the .BANK in all bank emails going forward to know you’re communicating with us.”
5. .BANK Site Announcement Bar/Banner/Cookie-based pop-up: “Welcome to our new .BANK domain! We made the move from [.com] to .BANK for an even more secure banking experience. Please be sure to look for the ‘.BANK’, instead of [.com], in all of our email addresses and in our website URL, to confirm you are interacting with us. If it’s not .BANK, it’s not us.” [Click here to read more]
6. Launching Your .BANK Site

   To officially launch your new .BANK domain you will have your website host setup a 301 Permanent Redirect from your existing [.com] to your new .BANK domain, and forward your .com email addresses to your .BANK email addresses (if not using aliases in your existing email accounts). This process means customers can continue to use existing bookmarks, links in emails, type your [.com] address in the browser bar, Google your [.com] domain, write to your [.com] email addresses as they always have, and they will be redirected to your new .BANK domain and .BANK email addresses.

   With a 301 redirect and email forwarding in place you won’t need to reprint collateral because all [.com] links and addresses still work. You can continue to use your existing materials and simply update email addresses and website URLs as you run out of business cards and other assorted printed materials.