Using .Barclays and .Barclaycard top level domains — Barclays begins

Big bank transitioning to .brand top level domain names.

Barclays, the huge bank based in Britain (market cap $77 billion), has begun using the .barclays and .barclaycard top level domain names.

As stated by a story in FinExtra, Barclays group CIO Troels Oerting states the domain names will create “a simplified online user experience, making it crystal clear to our clients that they are engaging with a genuine Barclays site. This clarity, along with the advantages of controlling our own online environment, enables us to provide an even more secure service.”

Google has indexed five pages under .Barclays. The bank seems to be using “home” as the second level domain name, e.g. home.barclays. One conundrum for .brands is creating a second level domain name that users will remember to type in.

Home.barclays seems to be a carbon copy of Barclays.com.

.Barclaycard is much more populated, with 213 indexed pages in Google.

Again on .Barclaycard, pages at home.barclaycard seem to be carbon copies of the same page on barclaycard.com.

For example:

home.barclaycard/news/2012-18.html

is the same thing as

barclaycard.com/news/2012-18.html

This seems like an ill-advised transition strategy, as it creates two duplicate sites.

When I search Google for the title of that page, “Barclaycard launches the latest version of its ePDQ payment processing system”, it brings up the .com page.