Online banking to see 'Facebookisation'

Thursday 11th September 2008

Online banking is set to go through a Facebook-style regeneration, according to new analysis.

Research by Datamonitor reveals the next generation of bank customers have grown up into the web offering customizable and interactive options and banks are now lining up banking to meet their needs.

However, banks are holding back from Facebookisation of services – with personalised account home pages and links to third party services and online widgets – over fears loss of control and security.

"A generation of consumers is coming onto the market that not only thinks of online as the natural way to do its banking, but also expects it to be as customisable and interactive as the Web 2.0 sites on which it spends its surfing hours,” said Rik Turner, retail banking technology analyst at Datamonitor.

"That can mean anything from having your online bank permanently available as a widget, to having third-party information such as stock prices delivered to it as an RSS feed, to its existence as an island in a virtual world like Second Life."

However, the report does highlight the difficulties banks face when making their sites more flexible.

"Enabling customers to pull in data from the stock exchange to inform their investment decisions is one thing, but what if a child pornographer or neo-Nazi decides to populate their online bank with some of their content, even making it available to their associates?" the report states.

Security is also a major hurdle.

Mr Turner said: “We expect to see some Web 2.0 capabilities such as mashups launched by the more innovative banks over the next year.

"But large-scale adoption will require work by enterprise software vendors to convince the great majority of them that the technology won’t be handing out the keys to the safe nor setting them up for lawsuits.”

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