Online Banking Finally Taking Off?
from the could-it-be? dept
I've been using online banking for a while now, and it's great. I can't imagine ever going back to living without it. It seems I'm not the only one. The NY Times has an article (of mostly anecdotes) saying that online banking is really taking off. While there have been online banking operations for a while, many of the big name online-only banks (or online spinoff banks of brick-and-mortar banks) ended up failing. That doesn't mean that it's not a useful concept, though. However, the article also points out some of the downsides of online banking. The biggest one is that usually when you pay by electronic check, the money is immediately taken out of your account - as opposed to when the recipient cashes a regular check. I know I had a problem with this last year when an electronic check of mine was lost. I couldn't just write out another check, since the money was already gone. As a completely random aside, I'm pretty sure I went to business school with the guy they talk about as the "power online banking user" at the beginning of the article.
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Finlands online banking
I do belive every major bank here is using online banking, and just recently we got our first 100% online bank.
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No Subject Given
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Other than that, when cashing US cheques (or savings bonds), you don't get access to all the money until they have cleared. If you go into a real bank, you can get the interest and exchange bonuses right away, but the machine has no way of telling what kind of material (ie cheque, US cheque, savings bond, cash etc) it's "eating"
However, the real reason I started writing this was in response to the "downloads directly to quicken" comment. I think this is a bad, bad idea, and encourages people to be lazy. On the other hand, I guess it's better than not looking at your bank statements at all (which apparently happens...). The problem with direct downloads is that most people just download their statements. They should be entering the information into Quicken first and then doing a cross-check against the bank records. Just downloading means that if the bank screws up (which happens!), and you are using the bank's records as your primary source of accounting info, you are never going to notice!
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