Your Cyberbank Is Always Open

Mowing the lawn, reading the newspaper, spending time with the family-ah, the joys of home life. But get ready to add to the list . . . are you banking at home yet? However you refer to it-electronic banking or cyberbanking-a growing number of homebodies are using their PCs to transact banking business instead of waiting in line at the local branch. Right now, an estimated 750,000 households are banking through their computers-paying bills, applying for loans, tracking their checking, savings and money market accounts, transferring funds among them, even getting stock quotes. Projections call for that number to increase to as many as 13 million by the year 2000. Many banks are beginning to link their accounts with big software companies, which have rolled out personal finance software products to advance the trend toward cyberbanking. Others, unwilling to allow a third party to come between them and their customers, have set up their own online access for customers. Still others are investigating putting "branches" on the Internet. But such services still have a long way to go. The bill-paying option, for example, has become relatively popular because it saves customers time and postage costs. With this service, your bills get paid with funds automatically debited from your account. But many merchants still do not accept electronic payments. In these instances, the online bank or service-provider must cut a check on your behalf and mail it. Moreover, some of these systems debit a person's account when the payment is due instead of when the check clears, so that customer loses out on interest previously earned during the float period. But perhaps people's greatest fear about cyberbanking is lack of adequate security. Right now, customers use personal identification numbers and passwords, and many systems are planning to encrypt all transactions. Still, probably no system is 100 percent hacker-proof. The challenge for banks is to make it close to impossible for anyone to gain electronic access to someone else's account. Regardless of the acceptance rate of cyberbanking, your local bank facility likely won't be turned into a gas station anytime soon. Banks still provide a personal link that customers may be slow to give up.