retail banking

This page looks at major studies and some overviews.

Preceding pages highlighted some systemic studies. A concise introduction to some of the issues facing banks going online is provided by Christian Bauer in Opportunities & Challenges of Electronic Distribution Channels in the Retail Banking Industry, a September 1999 paper at the Curtin Business School.

Within the US the NetBanking site established by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) has published a series of papers:

Internet Banking: Developments & Prospects (PDF) September 2000

Who Offers Internet Banking? (PDF) June 2000

Banking Over the Internet (PDF) December 1998

Technological Innovation in Banking & Payments (PDF) September 1998

Charles Goodhart's 2000 paper (PDF) Can Central Banking Survive the IT Revolution? and Michael Woodford's Monetary Policy in a World Without Money (PDF) cogently question much of the blather about the 'death of cash', as misplaced as that about death of the book or of the state.

     online banking 

Online banking and financial transactions using 'real' money is far less problematical, although going online can be an excellent way to lose lots of the green stuff.  

In the US, for example, Citigroup's online arm spent US$527 million in 1999 (up from US$378 million and US$236 million in preceding years).  Its net loss, no pun intended, increased to US$179 million (from US$143 million and US$94 million), on revenues of US$223 m. That's a lot of money, even if Citi was buying market share.

Jordi Canals' Universal Banking: International Comparisons & Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1997) and Universal Banking: Financial System Design Reconsidered (Chicago: Irwin 1996) edited by Anthony Saunders & Ingo Walter are suggestive.

The home pages of some of the major Australian financial institutions are:

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ)

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)

Bank of Western Australia (BWA)

National Australia Bank (NAB)

Suncorp-Metway (Suncorp)

St George Bank (StG)

Westpac (Westpac)

We've pointed to the major industry associations later in this guide.

     new institutions

We'll be looking at questions of whether electronic payment schemes and digital currencies will allow new institutions to enter financial markets. There's been speculation that telephone companies (arguably the bodies with greatest experience in nanopayments), internet service providers, software groups such as Microsoft and a variety of other entities would leverage expertise and brand recognition to take on national institutions. Such speculation seems grossly misplaced. For an elegant debunking of hype about Nokia we recommend Roger Bootle's paper The Future of Electronic Money: Why the Nok will not replace the Dollar (PDF).

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