Barclays confirms move away from .com to new gTLD
Barclays has become one of the first major companies to explicitly confirm it will dump traditional gTLDs and ccTLDs in favor of its new dot-brands.
The $25 billion-a-year bank said it will “transfer its online assets to proprietary domain names — .barclays and .barclaycard — away from the traditional location-specific .com and .co.uk web addresses.”
The transition is a “long-term” play, but it’s started already, with “non-transactional” parts of its web site already using the two new gTLDs.
Basically, we’ve entered the brochureware phase of the dot-brand evolution.
home.barclays already mirrors barclays.com — both are simultaneously live right now — but the online banking service remains at barclays.co.uk.
In a May 11 press release that seems to have slipped under everyone’s radar last week, Barclays chief security officer Troels Oerting, until a few months ago cyber-crime chief at Europol, said:
The launch of the .barclays and .barclaycard domain names creates a simplified online user experience, making it crystal clear to our customers 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, which we know is of utmost importance to our customers, and ultimately serves to increase trust and confidence in Barclays’ online entities.
This is precisely what advocates of dot-brands pitched as the benefits of the new gTLD program.
While many applicants stated similar plans in their gTLD applications, I think there’s been a degree of skepticism about whether they would follow through.
Barclays’ moves are happening faster than I expected — the .barclays gTLD was delegated in January — showing a degree of enthusiasm.
The charitable Australian Cancer Research Foundation in February launched sites under its .cancerresearch (not technically a dot-brand), while Hong Kong conglomerate CITIC Group has already experimented with a shift from .com to .citic.
In related news, the non-branded .bank gTLD opened for its sunrise period today.
Interesting to see if they can change consumer behavior from brand + extension to home.brand (if home can be agreed upon as the default 2nd level domain. They are going against the huge wave of advertising for major companies in the world promoting .com (accidentally?) in their ads. Worth watching their success/failure over time.
Last week GM launched GeneralMotors.green and now Barclays transitions to a new gTLD. Major companies are demonstrating they are enthusiastic about the opportunity of marketing-friendly gTLDs. Expect to see a huge wave of Fortune 100 companies embrace new gTLDs this summer.