Online Banking

Online Banking

banks such as HSBC have street branches and they also have online websites.  People use online banking as an instant way of transferring money and handling the money in their account with ease.

The advantages of online banking are:

• You can transfer money instantly so it saves your time
• There are no queue’s
• Your details stored when you first use your online banking account so it saves time having to put all your details again and again
• You can get access to Instant information of your bank account

However there are some disadvantages:

• Believe or not there are security risks
• It can be time consuming logging in and passing security stages
• It is easy to make mistakes
• There is no or an anonymous relationship between you and the bank

There are many features of online banking such as:

• <!Transactional (e.g., performing a financial transaction such as an account to account transfer, paying a bill, wire transfer, apply for a loan, new account, etc.)
• Payments to third parties, including bill payments and telegraphic/wire transfers
• Funds transfers between a customer's own transactional account and savings accounts
• Investment purchase or sale
• Loan applications and transactions, such as repayments of enrollments
• Non-transactional (e.g., online statements, cheque links, cobrowsing, chat)
• Viewing recent transactions
• Downloading bank statements, for example in PDF format
• Viewing images of paid cheques
• Financial Institution Administration
• Management of multiple users having varying levels of authority
• Transaction approval process

Security

Protection through single password authentication, as is the case in most secure Internet shopping sites, is not considered secure enough for personal online banking applications in some countries.

• The PIN/TAN system where the PIN represents a password, used for the login and TANs representing one-time passwords to authenticate transactions. TANs can be distributed in different ways, the most popular one is to send a list of TANs to the online banking user by postal letter. The most secure way of using TANs is to generate them by need using a security token. These token generated TANs depend on the time and a unique secret, stored in the security token .Usually online banking with PIN/TAN is done via a web browser using SSL secured connections, so that there is no additional encryption needed.

• Signature based online banking where all transactions are signed and encrypted digitally. The Keys for the signature generation and encryption can be stored on smartcards or any memory medium, depending on the concrete implementation.