Finance Sites Growing in Importance for Europeans 19/07/00 According to recently released findings from Net Value for May 2000, over 1 in 3 (36.6%) of UK Internet home users are logging on to financial sites, equating to 3.6m users. This compares with 34% of French users, but sees the UK lagging behind Germany, where 43% of home Internet users (4.3m) are visiting finance sites. Growth in the numbers of visitors to financial sites in both France and Germany has been phenomenal: since January 2000, visitor numbers have grown by 63% in Germany and 88% in France. In contrast, growth in the UK was slower at 27.5%. The top financial sites in the UK are banking sites: Egg remains no.1 in the UK rankings with 881,100 unique visitors, followed by Barclays.co.uk with 445,500 visitors and nationwide.co.uk with 306,000 visitors. In contrast, the top financial websites in France and Germany are both Stock Exchange sites, i.e. Boursorama.com in France and Teledata.de in Germany. This seems to reflect the growing interest in share information: particularly, in France, the new found ease of trading online and the recent wave of share issues seems to be capturing the public imagination. The research reveals a correlation between long standing Internet users and a willingness of visitors to financial websites to then proceed on to a secure part of the site. This may be evidence that they are more comfortable with security issues: for example, 34.5% of UK users making a secure connection, and 44% of German users, first connected to the Internet in 1996 or before.