Most active online: Bank of America

Of all the major international banks, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (www.bankofamerica.com) has the most active online presence.

According to Alexa (www.alexa.com), an information company that provides analytics, BoA Merrill’s is the 133th most active website in the world. Facebook is ranked top, followed by Google.

Alexa’s data is real time and the figures constantly vary, but give a good indication of which banks are the biggest on the internet.

Chase Bank ranks second, at 154th, although this is the firm’s domestic consumer bank; J.P. Morgan’s site, jpmorgan.com, comes in at 21,685th, more in line with other investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse.

The busiest website among Asia-based banks is not Chinese, but Indian, with HDFC ranked 403rd at the time of this writing, versus 424th for ICBC. China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank, ICICI and State Bank of India duke it out just further below.

The laggards are banks from South Korea — supposedly the most wired country in the world — which are outpaced by rivals from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia and Japan.

For HSBC and Standard Chartered, FinanceAsia took the liberty of singling out some of their Asia country-based sites, as these were particularly active in relation to global portals. Their global (UK) sites are bigger, but HSBC Hong Kong ranks a respectable 2,487th and StanChart’s India site is 4,101st.

Top 50 most active websites among financial institutions