Wingspan Bank

» see wingspanbank.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A bank is the most locally bounded product there is. Wingspan wanted an American social security number and an American credit file, so there was never a version of it anyone in Ankara could have opened. It is in here for the question it was built to answer, which every other country got asked a few years later and answered a different way.

Bank One launched it on 24 june 1999 out of Wilmington, Delaware, the first American bank to stand up a separate internet-only bank rather than bolt a website onto the one it already had. The slogan did the whole argument in one line: if your bank could start over, this is what it would be. The bank saying it was the fourth largest in the country, with something like eighteen hundred branches it was now describing as the past.

The launch was bought rather than earned. Wingspan took placement on the big portals, AOL and MSN among them, paid the first ten thousand customers a hundred dollars each to open an account, and ran an introductory ten percent on checking. Roughly 150 million dollars went into the brand across two years. It got 225,000 customers, which sounds like a lot until you notice how many of them were holding exactly the hundred dollars the bonus had put in the account.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was actually selling ~

The pitch to the industry was that a bank with no branches has no branch costs, so it can pay better interest and still make money. That part was arithmetic and it held. The part that did not hold was the assumption that deposits would follow the interest rate. People opened Wingspan accounts as a second account, funded them with the minimum, and left their salary going into the bank down the road.

There was also nobody left inside Bank One to defend it. Jim Stewart, hired to run Wingspan, was gone by late 1999 to start Juniper Financial. John McCoy, the Bank One chief executive who had authorized the whole thing, was pushed out that december, and Jamie Dimon arrived in early 2000 with an expense problem to solve and no attachment to somebody else's experiment. A project like this needs a sponsor upstairs. Both of Wingspan's were gone inside a year of launch.

~ the cracks ~

You cannot put cash into a website. That sentence is most of the story. Wingspan customers who wanted to deposit a check had to mail it, and Bank One's branches, all eighteen hundred of them, were not allowed to take it, because the separation from the branch network was the whole premise. The company ended up putting Wingspan kiosks in places, which is a strange thing for a bank whose selling point was not having any places.

On 28 june 2001 Bank One announced it was done. The wording in the release was about eliminating the substantial expense of supporting another brand, which is a polite way of saying the second brand had been the product. Customers were told they would be moved to bankone.com over the autumn, and by september the name was off the site.

~ the long tail ~

Bank One itself lasted three more years before merging into JPMorgan Chase in 2004, and Dimon went with it. Wingspan's 225,000 accounts became ordinary Bank One online accounts and most of the people holding them probably noticed only the change of letterhead.

The awkward part is that Wingspan was right about the product and wrong about the packaging. Almost nobody walks into a branch now, and the branchless bank is not a category any more because it is what a bank is. What killed Wingspan was the decision to build it as a competitor to its owner instead of as its owner's front door, which meant every dollar it spent on marketing was a dollar spent telling Bank One's own customers to leave. wingspanbank.com does not resolve.

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