For the context :
I work on the website of a big financial company. The company sells products in both the banking and insurance segments and is seen by it's customers as one entity.
Although the current strategy is to focus on the user experience and give an impression of unity and simplicity, it has been decided that the banking and insurance activities should be split in two separate websites, managed by two different teams.
Both websites share the same visual guidelines but have a different content, tools and navigation. And they provide links between each other.
A big part of the traffic on the original website was for the internet banking application but it's the insurance website that kept the original URL.
So, by default (favorite or habit), the user lands on the insurance website.
- update - In the previous common site, the homepage provided content for both groups of products and the main navigation provided links for all products.
In the navigation, banking and insurance products were kind of grouped in their own sections but there was some overlap like the investments where there was both type of products.
The problem :
Currently, before the homepage of the insurance website, we added a choice page where the user can decide if he wants to go to the insurance or bank section.
Both websites also provide a link to their counterpart in the main navigation.
But as these are multi-language websites, there was already a page before the homepage for choosing the language (fortunately, this choice is saved in a cookie).
So accessing the homepage insurance is a 2 or 3 step process.
Question
Do you have an idea on the potential negative impact of two choice pages before the homepage ? A lot of my colleagues were afraid that without such a page, the user would get lost.
What could be a better approach to make sure the user finds what he's looking for without getting in his way ?