What is E-Banking?

In its very basic form, e-banking can mean the provision of information about a bank and its services via a home page on the World Wide Web (WWW). More sophisticated e-banking services provide customer access to accounts, the ability to move their money between different accounts, and making payments or applying for loans via e-Channels. The term e-banking will be used in this book to describe the latter type of provision of services by an organization to its customers. Such customers may be either an individual or another business. To understand the electronic distribution of goods and services, the work of Rayport and Sviokla (1994; 1995) is a good starting point. They highlight the differences between the physical market place and the virtual market place, which they describe as an information-defined arena. In the context of e-banking, electronic delivery of services means a customer conducting transactions using online electronic channels such as the Internet.