For new student's arriving at the University of Georgia for the first time, the banking options can be confusing. Some students enter school already possessing a checking account, while others open their first account here in Athens. Still more students decide to open another account here in town in addition to the one from home. Often, after finding a place to live and registering for classes, the simplest solution for a student is to select their roommates' bank or the first one they see while standing at the arch. Most consumers do not take nor have the time to visit and compare the various banks in their community. Banks have gone to a great deal of trouble to design checking and savings combinations for specific customer needs. Students, on the other hand, are making decisions without considering their possibilities and winding up with banks that do not suit their individual financial needs. Students at the University of Georgia have many different needs when it comes to their financial situation.

Often, customers will have their account for a long span of time before they sit down and consider all of the available options at banks in their community. For instance, the student may maintain a normal balance below a specified level and as a result be charged a base fee or additional fees. Over the course of a years time this can add up to seventy dollars or more. College students spend a great deal of time and effort to save this much on books for their classes, looking for deals on food or drinks and so forth. The same effort is not put into the search for an appropriate bank. Usually this is due to the fact that at the time a choice was necessary, the potential cost of the decision was not readily apparent, and the information needed to make an informed decision is not easily obtained.

The class project for our team involves finding a suitable solution, which would allow any student to have easy access to information on the banks in Athens. This information would help students make an informed decision quickly. The CEO's solution to this problem is a web page that compares the banks in an easy to read format. Our group first thought of putting this information onto a flyer that we could hand out to incoming students. This would have been an expensive solution. Not to mention the viability of making sure every student had access to these brochures was questionable. Then we decided it would be more efficient and educational to have this information on a web page. The page would be inexpensive to create and easy to update on a regular basis. In contrast, if a bank were to change one of its current plans or add a new one, the difficulty and costs of reprinting an entire brochure would certainly send us all to the poor house.

To let people know that there was a web page that compared these banks we decided to put up signs. These signs were cheap to print and easily displayed in various places around campus. The banks that were chosen were Athens First, First American, Georgia National, NationsBank, SunTrust, MainStreet and Wachovia. The web page contains the locations of all the banks. The page also has spreadsheets that compare each bank's checking account, savings account, and credit cards. In determining which checking accounts to include in our web page we only chose the ones we felt were best suited for students. These were usually the most inexpensive accounts available. In order to achieve this goal, several steps were taken to obtain and organize this information. A survey was developed and taken. In the survey we asked students if they already had a checking account when they arrived at the University of Georgia. We also asked students if they opened an account when they arrived in Athens. Finally we asked students if they would have picked up a flyer or visited a web page that compared the services provided by local banks. Each team member took a set of the same questions and polled students through phone or live contact. Each team member was assigned a separate bank. The members then visited their assigned bank and acquired information on branch locations, checking, savings and credit card options. Results from the survey were compiled and converted to graphical representations. The various account information was compiled and summarized. Address and telephone information were listed in a text file. A new student not familiar with Athens should easily be able to locate the bank of his or her choice. Finally, all of this information was imbedded into the final project web page.