TA leading global bank recognized the need to modernize its digital identity strategy and prepare for ICANN’s upcoming Brand TLD round.
Business Challenge
The bank did not apply for a Brand TLD in ICANN’s first round. After an internal assessment, the Digital Brand team identified key gaps:
- No strategy or vision for acquiring a Brand TLD.
- Limited awareness of competitor activity and industry use cases.
- Unclear role of internal business stakeholders in domain strategy.
- Outdated policies and fragmented procedures for managing domains.
Executives wanted to benchmark against competitors, explore new use cases, and establish enterprise-wide best practices.
Solution
The bank engaged Authentic Web to provide strategic guidance, competitive intelligence, and practical frameworks for Brand TLD readiness.
Our approach included:
1. Policies & Procedures
- Defined standardized workflows for domain registration, renewals, edits, and expiries.
- Established roles, approvals, and notifications for end-to-end governance.
- Created a nomenclature framework for consistent domain and URL use cases.
2. Strategic Point of View (POV)
- Developed an enterprise-wide Brand TLD strategy and ROI model.
- Aligned executives and stakeholders behind a definitive business case for ICANN’s Round
- Provided benchmarks to measure future progress against peers.
3. Competitive Analysis
- Evaluated the bank’s domain portfolio relative to competitors.
- Identified emerging best practices across the financial sector.
- Positioned business and product leaders with a clear view of market opportunities.
Outcomes & Benefits
The bank is now equipped to leverage a Brand TLD as both a security enhancement and a business innovation driver.
- Standardized policies and workflows improved consistency and governance.
- A clear strategic roadmap was created for a Brand TLD application in Round 2.
- Executives gained visibility into competitor positioning and best practices.
CLIENT PERSPECTIVE
The head of digital marketing was able to promote an all-new, standardized process for managing domains from inception to expiry throughout the organization. In additional his team was able to formulate a complete strategy to prepare for their Brand TLD application in the coming ICANN round.
He said, “prior to engaging Authentic Web we simply did not have the time or expertise to delve into this area. We suspected that we had issues but could not seem to get a handle on the scope or implications of our domain portfolio direction. Authentic Web helped us define the three critical areas in need of action. Their organized, logical and comprehensive approach gave us end-result documentation that will literally chart our course from present-day policies to ultimately applying for our own brand registry and using it to innovate our brand to achieve positive business results across the enterprise.”