Online Banking

Online banking is becoming a very prominent way of banking in today’s world. Many people use it for many different reasons including setting up direct debits, transferring money from one account to another or simply just checking their personal balance for as many accounts as they have. This generally offers a much easier way to bank than doing it physically, it allows users to do it when ever they like any time of the day, and this makes it easier as they are not restricted to banking during the opening hours of a bank.  

The most common features of online banking are transactional, non transactional and management. The services that are used in the transactional category are performing a transaction such an account to another account transfer, paying of many different bills, applying for a loan, setting up a new account and many others. Examples of this are customers transferring money from a customer’s own transactional account to their savings account in which may enhance the possibilities of interest, also payments to third parties, including bill payments, are made much easier by doing it online as it cuts the hassle.

There are many different banks that offer an online service to make it easier for their customers, including NatWest, Santander and HSBC, but one of the main banking online services is www.egg.com. The reason they are so popular is because they offer many different services which other banking websites do not including their ‘Egg Money Manager’. The ‘Egg Money Manager’ allows users of the service to see the balances for their other online bank and building society accounts alongside their Egg balances, and all of this is available on the Egg website, the fact that it can be your credit and store cards, current account, loan and even your mortgage accounts make the whole service even greater. With just one click, will take you straight to your other banks' websites and you won't need to log in again, this is a massive advantage as it saves a lot of time when trying to deal with more than one account, the only disadvantage would be that with some banks you may be asked to provide additional verification, but even with this it is still a massive time saver.

Although used by millions, people still believe that online banking isn’t safe to use as they believe many things could go wrong such as, being scammed, losing their details or making a mistake causing them to lose money, this is why the majority of banking is still done in the actual bank on high streets. Online banking has become very safe and easy to use over the course of it being around, which is why people are now not so worried about using it, they realise that it is a very quick, easy and safe to use. Many organisations that offer online banking have now introduced a way of making online banking more safe for customers to use; places like egg.com have offered an ‘Egg Guarantee’  that means if any money from an egg account is stolen or taken by fraud the organisation will pay it back into the account it was taken from, this makes customers feel safer when they use such services.

HSBC, in the recent years, have introduced a new, inventive way of making sure that all accounts are secure, the ‘HSBC Secure Key’. It is a device that gives you a random number when you enter your code into the device, you then log onto the internet and onto the HSBC website, which will know that you have used the device and ask you to enter your PIN code and the unique random code that the device had given you. This is a very clever way of enforcing security for the website and ensuring that customers will not feel that it is a risk to use the internet to do their banking.

I personally use this service, as, for me, it is very useful for checking a balance before I buy something online, and I know that everyone in my immediate family also use this service. My sister in fact uses the HSBC secure key as when she was first told about online banking she didn’t feel that it would be secure and her details would be stolen and from that her hard earned money. But once the new HSBC Secure Key was introduced she knew that it would be okay and would be safe to use.