2025 Banking Website Benchmark Report Reveals Huge Gaps in Speed, Resilience, and Digital Experience

Business Wire

28-05-2025

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Catchpoint, the leader in Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), today unveiled its latest Banking Website Performance Benchmark Report, providing a deep dive into the digital health of the banking sector. The report evaluates 49 global financial institutions based on eight key metrics of digital performance—from availability and DNS resolution to load time, layout stability, and server responsiveness. The results reveal large disparities in user experience across the industry—and offer a clear roadmap for banks to improve.
Download the Banking Website Performance Benchmark Report: https://www.catchpoint.com/asset/banking-website-performance-benchmark-report-2025
Key takeaways from the 2025 report:
The study found that while some banks delivered fast, seamless performance worldwide, many still struggle with slow load times, layout instability, and major regional gaps. Composite scores ranged from over 90 (out of 100) to as low as 8, with only 1 in 4 banks meeting user expectations for a page to fully load in under 3 seconds.
Headline findings:
Leaders prove it's possible to be fast and reliable: UBS, ING Bank (Voya), State Street Corp., and Thrivent Financial topped the rankings with blazing-fast speeds, near-perfect uptime, and highly stable front-end experiences.
Big names don't always mean big performance: Many well-known banks ranked outside the top 30, dragged down by heavy content and front-end complexity.
Availability isn't the safety net it used to be: Many banks maintained 99.9%+ uptime but ranked lower due to slow page loads, high layout shifts, or poor regional delivery.
Regional performance gaps remain wide: In markets like Africa and South America, load times were often double those in North America, even when server response times were similar.
Huge variance in user experience: Composite scores ranged from just above 90 to below 10—a nearly 10x difference in digital experience quality. Document complete times varied from under 2 seconds to over 10. And DNS resolution times ranged by more than 1,200ms depending on region.
Availability is high—but not universal: While 75% of banks achieved 99.9% uptime or higher, a few dropped below 91%.
Front-end experience is the real differentiator: Metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) had significant influence on the final rankings.
Alongside the full rankings, the report also includes:
Regional performance breakdowns across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas
Recommendations for improving web experience, including XLOs, API monitoring, CDN strategy, and front-end optimization
Testing methodology
The report is based on a two-week testing period and represents Catchpoint's largest benchmarking study to date. Performance was measured across 26 U.S. cities and 97 international locations, using Catchpoint's industry-leading Internet Performance Monitoring platform. Leveraging a global network of more than 3,000 intelligent monitoring agents, the study provides an unparalleled view into how the world's leading banking websites perform across availability, speed, stability, and user experience.
The future of Digital Resilience in Banking
Today's users expect more than just uptime—they expect speed, responsiveness, and consistency. Catchpoint's comprehensive report into the web performance of leading financial institutions shows how digital performance is becoming a competitive differentiator. It's no longer enough to be available; you have to be fast everywhere.'
"Banks are under immense pressure to innovate while keeping systems running smoothly," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. "Too often, reliability takes a backseat to release schedules, and teams are stretched thin managing performance issues reactively. AI and automation can help, but they're not a silver bullet — banks need real visibility into their digital infrastructure to prevent outages before they happen, protect brand loyalty, and reduce customer churn. That's where we've been easily stepping in to help out.'
Download the Banking Website Performance Benchmark Report: https://www.catchpoint.com/asset/banking-website-performance-benchmark-report-2025
About Catchpoint
In today's exacting digital age, performance is paramount. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs all rely on Catchpoint to ensure high performance and digital resilience by catching issues across the Internet Stack before they impact their customers, workforce or digital experiences. Catchpoint's Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers Internet Synthetics, RUM, BGP, Tracing, performance optimization, high-fidelity data, and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics derived from the world's largest, most detailed, active observability network. Today's digital world requires resilience and exceptional performance, which is why The Internet Relies on Catchpoint.