Study reveals e-banking hurdles

Business process management provider, Pegasystems, and Finextra have found 63% of banks recognise that delivering electronic bank account management services is a great opportunity to win new clients and better serve existing ones, states Reuters.

However, the recent survey which the organisations conducted also revealed that due to a lack of agility in bank IT departments, over 45% of them believe it will take more than a year to undertake the necessary process and system reengineering to enable it.

The research results outline the key challenges both banks and corporate clients face in the areas of account opening and management. Both corporations and banks still utilise very manual and paper-based processes, creating an inefficient, error-prone environment.

With a number of the UK's large retail banks currently toiling, new entrants are looking to steal a march on them. And with this comes a need to develop core technology platforms, which means some new opportunities are on the cards for financial IT workers, says eFinancialCareers UK.

Rik Turner, senior analyst within Datamonitor's financial services technology team, suggests a number of retail banks with "deep pockets and clean balance sheets" are currently looking to enter the UK market, in a bid to capitalise on the crisis surrounding current incumbents.

Chief among these are Tesco Personal Finance and Vernon Hill, the US entrepreneur behind Commerce Bancorp, Turner says. One of the key challenges facing these new players is developing a core technology platform.

The double-charging blunder at Bank of Ireland may affect as many as 200 000 customers, experts have said, reports Independent.ie.

And they warned it could happen again. Bank of Ireland customers who used their Laser cards to pay for goods and services two Fridays ago found their accounts were mistakenly debited twice each time they used the card for a transaction that day.

Many customers ended up with their accounts overdrawn in the next few days because of the error. The bank processes about 60 million Laser transactions a year. When asked last night, the bank, which has one million personal customers, could not guarantee the mistake would not happen again.