process your checks, manage your account, and process your loan application. So what can banks do to reduce this overhead and better manage their business? The answer: on-line banking and electronic bill payment systems, a new e-business model that allows banks to take advantage of the Internet craze while maintaining the traditional brick-and-mortar infrastructure that has successfully serviced their customers for the past one hundred plus years.On-line banking is actually a very simple concept. Create some type of web interface that a customer can access his or her account twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The customer can have full access to account balances, fund transfers, loans, interest rates, and any other type of information that is available from the bank. All this can happen without having to enter the banking facility. Electronic bill payment systems can be accessed from that same web interface so that the bank customer can actually make payments to creditors without having to write a check. The bank's computers can process the transaction without a bank employee present. The cost savings of these two trends are substantial since the majority of your banking transactions can be processed without a bank employee. The hard part is selling this service to the customers and having them use it for the majority of their transactions. The bank's customers have been used to the same process their entire lives. Selling change is often a very difficult thing to do. In fact, there are still customers today that will not withdraw money from an ATM, they still prefer to do all their banking transactions inside the bank. In addition to this hard sell, it is also very costly for a bank to implement these new products, money that many smaller banks can not afford to invest in a weakening economy. Currently, approximately 5% of all bank customers have used the Internet to access their bank account. Of this 5%, less ...
