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Archive for the ‘Online Banking’ Category

Online banking uses modern computer technologies to offer the users convenient banking facilities. If you have access to such a facility, there is absolutely no need for you to personally visit your bank’s branch for any sort of transaction. You can simply login with the internet-banking password that your banker has given you, and carry all the necessary work online. It also eliminates the necessity of doing any paper-based work and saves considerable time for the users.

Benefits for the Users and Bankers:

The users can do variety of work using your online banking pin code. Besides paying the routine bills online, you can use the automated system to shop for loans, credit cards, life insurance policies and various such things. An online banking facility enables you to handle your finances efficiently.

The bankers benefit equally from the online banking facilities. Besides offering their users the convenience of banking, the online banking system means significant cost savings for the bankers themselves. With such an automatic system in place, the bankers need not to hire employees specialized in handling paper work and teller interactions. This reduces the bankers’ operating costs considerably, translating into significant cost savings over the long-term.

In today’s competitive banking industry where every banking institution wants to garner a competitive edge over its peers, offering advanced online banking systems is a must. Mostly all the major nationalized banks, regional banks, and even small credit union offer banking facility online to retain their customers.

Today, most large national banks, many regional banks and even smaller banks and credit unions offer some form of online banking, variously known as PC banking, home banking, electronic banking or Internet banking.

Various Advantages of Banking Online:

The biggest advantage of online banking is its convenience. Unlike a bank’s branches, online banking facilities are open 24/7. This offers you banking from the comfort of your home with just a click. You can access such a facility from anywhere in the world. This could be great advantage if you need to address urgent monetary concerns while away from home. Transactions online are fast and mostly quicker than ATM transactions. Moreover, online banking systems have sophisticated tools that provide effective management of the users’ assets.

Obtaining an Internet banking ID can however be a little time taking. You will need to complete formalities such as cresting the ID and filling an online application form for obtaining your Internet banking pin code. Moreover, if you wish to operate an account jointly with your spouse, you will be required to sign power of attorney for initiating the operation. Always remember to obtain a printed receipt after every online transaction and store in your records.

Life has become so busy and so hectic that we find ourselves rarely having time to eat, let alone visit the bank. The vast internet has made it possible to do our banking right online. Many banks today offer the capability to do your banking on their website; additionally, there are some bank institutions that are online only. While banks that only exist online have begun to offer extremely competitive rates, they cannot even begin to be able to replace the personal customer service you can obtain at regular bank.

So let us delve deeper into the realm of online banking, it does have many advantages and the biggest, most popular one is the flexibility it can offer. Online banking offers you quick access to your account twenty-four hours of the day, seven days of the week, and three hundred and sixty five days of the year. With this flexibility, you know longer have to live within the constraints of specific hours of banking and you do not have to worry about holidays. Online banking is open at all hours, every single day.

Even as interest rates soar with traditional banking, typically an online bank can offer you amazing deals on different banking aspects such as mortgages, credit cards, and personal loans. So what is it that online banking can offer you? Good question, you can view all your statements and balances right online, without having to deal with telephones, ATM’s, or ten different pieces of paper. You can also view any type of transfer of funds, standing orders, and bills you have paid. You still get the traditional checkbooks and debit cards with these online banking institutions.

The first step is choosing the right online bank for you, you can find many different banks all around the internet. You will want to research them fully, to all possible extents to ensure that they are reliable and secure. You will have to fill out an application form that will likely require you at some point to sign and send back to the bank. You will also likely be required to show some form of identification for account activation.

Ensure that the banking website integrates SSL (secure sockets layer) for security as well as many other types of security measures set in place to keep your transactions safe. Once you have your online banking account set up outside of the secure website, it is up to you to keep your personal information just as safe. For instance, never write down your password, user name or Pin number. If possible, make each of these things something you can easily remember. Keep each of these things to yourself, do not give them out to any other person, if this person decides to access your account they can have full control over your funds. Do not send your information through the e-mail these can be intercepted easily. Additionally, use a password that is unique and not an obvious one like 12345. Finally, always end your banking session by logging out and closing the browser, this will prevent anyone who has access to your computer from accessing your account.

Practically any financial transaction can be completed through the use of online banking. The advent of direct deposit made getting your money lightning quick and accurate, and many banks have catered to the needs of their account holders by simplifying online banking features.

Do you remember the days when you had to make a physical trip down to your corner bank just to check the balance of your accounts and to make a deposit? While you may have to take a trek to Wachovia every once in awhile, online banking has drastically reduced the necessity to do so.

Popular bank like Bank of America offer their customers added security features, such as encryption and pass codes. Bank of America even implemented a customized image security feature, whereby you choose an image and if you happen to land on a phishing website posing as the authentic site, you will know it before entering personal information.

Online banking through Bank of America and other big names such as Citibank and Wachovia offer similar features through their services. For starters, you can receive online statements instead of those paper ones that always seem to arrive a month after you made the purchases listed on them. You can also utilize online bill payment and add lists of payees to automatically transfer funds to.

Most online banks also allow account holders to transfer funds between checking and savings accounts. Popular online bank ING Direct even allows you to transfer money from their service to other banks, such as Washington Mutual (WaMu) for free. Add this benefit to convenience such as online loan applications and online banking is hard to live without!

A very famous cash management tool that banks now use is their online banking access. Some call it internet banking, online banking or other catchy names but basically, it allows clients of banks to access their account online, view their balance, check the history of their account, pay bills, transfer funds and other actions previously available only if you physically visit a branch of your bank. Online banking saves time, effort, gas, parking fees and it lets you avoid traffic rush hours. More and more banks are now moving towards having this tool and it is gaining popularity faster than the earlier version of a similar tool, which was telephone banking. But how did internet banking start? Here is a brief online banking history.

It is believed that online banking began in 1995. It was October 6 and Presidential Savings Bank offered an alternative to the usual branch banking by offering an online access of bank services. This opened the gates for banks solely existing in the internet and allowed other physical banks to join in. Nowadays, it is rare to see huge banks that offer no online banking services as more and more people get connected to the web. There are also more and more banks that advertise on the web and there are now a huge number of web domains owned by banks. This is basically the start of the online banking history.

Today, 30 banks in the US exist only in cyberspace and their depositors grow exponentially due to the fact that they are virtually accessible 24/7 and they are hassle free. There are several types of people who avail of online banking services. There are those that see it as a toll that they can use but do not really explore what else they can do with it aside from balance checking and bills payments. For other transactions, they would rather go straight to the source. Then, there are those that are avid internet users, mostly those that make a living or spend half of their day connected to the web. These are actually so dependent on online banking that if a bank does not offer this service, they won’t even consider that bank.

It has now been a decade and three years since the birth of online banking and research shows that it is 100 more cost efficient for banks to run on cyberspace than to have the actual teller to process transactions. However, a pit fall here is that not all Americans are ready for this sort of thing. Some would rather have a face to face interaction with tellers as trust is till a big issue, especially when it comes to money (although online banking virtually destroys human error). Also, research indicate that although phone banking is slowly losing popularity, it is still the number one go-to when clients are at a lost.

Online banking history is still in the making. More and more advances are being made each day on this field and with that being said, let us expect more on internet banking.

Incoming search terms:

The world is changing at a staggering rate and technology is considered to be the key driver for these changes around us (Papers4you.com, 2006). An analysis of technology and its uses show that it has permeated in almost every aspect of our life. According to Tero et al (2004) many activities are handled electronically due the acceptance of information technology at home as well as at workplace. Internet can be seen as a truly global phenomenon that has made time and distance irrelevant to many transactions. According to Heikki et al. (2002), the transformation from the traditional banking towards e-banking has been a ‘leap’ change.

The evolution of electronic banking started from the use of automatic teller machines (ATM) and has passed through telephone banking, direct bill payment, electronic fund transfer and the revolutionary online banking (Alter, 2002). The future of electronic banking according to some is the acceptance of WAP enabled banking and interactive-TV banking (Petrus & Nelson, 2006). But it has been forecasted that among all the categories, online banking is the future of electronic financial transactions. The rise in the e-commerce and the use of internet in its facilitation along with the enhanced online security of transactions and sensitive information has been the core reasons for the penetration of online banking in everyday life (Papers4you.com, 2006). According to the latest official figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2006) indicate that subscriptions to the internet has grown more than 50% from 15 million in 2000 to 35 million in 2005 in the UK. It has also been estimated that 60% of the population in the UK use internet in their daily lives.

The fundamental shift towards the involvement of the customer in the financial service provision with the help of technology especially internet has helped in reduce costs of financial institutions as well as helped client to use the service at anytime and from virtually anywhere with access to an internet connection. According to theorists (Walfried et al., 2005) customer evaluation of the electronic services is influenced by attributions of success and failure in inter personal service situations. The use of electronic banking has removed the banking personnel that facilitate the transactions and has placed additional responsibilities on the customers to transact with the service. Although the use of E-banking is provided for the benefit of the customers but these changes require increased work or involvement on the part of customers. These and other factors might be seen as lesser service provided in terms of customer service. But these assumptions would be wrong if the customer knows the value of using the electronic service.

Thus it can be concluded that a fit between task i.e. the banking; technology i.e. the user interface and its reliability; and individuals i.e. the customers and their knowledge about using the service, is the key to successful E-banking services (Zigurs & Buckland, 1998).

References:

Alter, S. (2002), “Information Systems” 4th Edition, Prentice Hall

Heikki Karjaluoto, Minna Mattila, Tapio Pento (2002), “Factors underlying attitude formation towards online banking in Finland”, International Journal of Bank Marketing; Volume: 20 Issue: 6; 2002 Research paper

ONS (2005), “Office of National Statistics”, http://www.statistics.gov.uk

Papers For You (2006) “C/B/93. Dissertation. Will online business replace the traditional business in the banking industry in UK?”, Available from http://www.coursework4you.co.uk/sprtfina35.htm [17/06/2006]

Papers For You (2006) “P/F/174. Dissertation. Adoption of Online Banking”, Available from http://www.coursework4you.co.uk/sprtfina35.htm [18/06/2006]

Petrus Guriting, Nelson Oly Ndubisi (2006), “Borneo online banking: evaluating customer perceptions and behavioural intention”, Management Research News; Volume: 29 Issue: 1/2; 2006 Conceptual Paper

Tero Pikkarainen, Kari Pikkarainen, Heikki Karjaluoto, Seppo Pahnila (2004), “Consumer acceptance of online banking: an extension of the technology acceptance model”, Internet Research; Volume: 14 Issue: 3; 2004 Research paper

Walfried M. Lassar, Chris Manolis, Sharon S. Lassar (2005), “The relationship between consumer innovativeness, personal characteristics, and online banking adoption”, International Journal of Bank Marketing; Volume: 23 Issue: 2; 2005 Research paper

Zigurs, I. & Buckland, B. (1998), “A Theory of Task/Technology Fit and Group Support Systems Effectiveness”, MIS Quarterly, Sep98, Vol. 22 Issue 3, p313-334, 22p

Almost everyone recognizes that it is very difficult to get anything accomplished without a bank account. However, it is not always possible to get an account because of things that may have happened in your past. If you do have a bank account, but are concerned about putting your money at risk by adding an online aspect to the account, you should know that online banking is safer today than it has ever been.

Technology continues to make it possible for new and improved encryptions and secure methods to be implemented. Making an informed decision is extremely important. Do some research about the possible banks that you might be interested in and learn all the options available. Each type of online banking will have different costs and resources available to you. Most of the companies that provide online banking will not charge you for most of the services. The bank makes money by investing your funds usually in the form of a loan.

Find out if your prospective bank requires minimum deposits or balances. Learn if the bank does not allow people to withdraw their money anytime they wish. The services that are offered can differ from one organization to another. If the bank requires you to start a bank account as part of your checking account services, this is an important factor to understand. Do the online banking services you are interested in have the necessary support you need?

Learn all about the safety features the bank has in place to protect your funds. The bank should provide hacker-proof features that are built in as part of the website. No one wants to risk his or her personal information, card numbers, or social security number on a poorly protected online banking system. Take time to understand the services that are available and you can find the right online banking service you can trust.