Online banking

Online banking (OLB) is an electronic payment system that enables customers of a financial institution to conduct financial transactions on a website operated by the institution, such as a retail bank, virtual bank, credit union or building society. Online banking is also referred as Internet banking, e-banking, virtual banking and by other terms.

To access a financial institution's online banking facility, a customer with Internet access would need to register with the institution for the service, and set up some password (under various names) for customer verification. The password for online banking is normally not the same as for telephone banking. Financial institutions now routinely allocate customers numbers (also under various names), whether or not customers have indicated an intention to access their online banking facility. Customers' numbers are normally not the same as account numbers, because a number of customer accounts can be linked to the one customer number. The customer can link to the customer number any account which the customer controls, which may be cheque, savings, loan, credit card and other accounts. Customer numbers will also not be the same as any debit or credit card issued by the financial institution to the customer.

Features

The common features fall broadly into several categories:Online banking facilities offered by various financial institutions have many features and capabilities in common, but also have some that are application specific.

• A bank customer can perform non-transactional tasks through online banking, including -
  • Viewing account balances
  • Viewing recent transactions
  • Downloading bank statements, for example in PDF format
  • Viewing images of paid cheques
  • Ordering cheque books
  • Download periodic account statements
  • Downloading applications for M-banking, E-banking etc.
• Bank customers can transact banking tasks through online banking, including -
  
   
  • Funds transfers between the customer's linked accounts
  • Paying third parties, including bill payments (see, e.g., BPAY) and third party fund transfers(see, e.g., FAST)
  • Investment purchase or sale
  • Loan applications and transactions, such as repayments of enrollments
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  • Credit card applications
  • Register utility billers and make bill payments

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  Management of multiple users having varying levels of authorityFinancial institution administration
• Transaction approval process

Some financial institutions offer unique Internet banking services, for example:

• Personal financial management support, such as importing data into personal accounting software. Some online banking platforms support account aggregation to allow the customers to monitor all of their accounts in one place whether they are with their main bank or with other institutions.