Internet & Banks: Making Life Easy for Everyone, Everywhere

One of the marvels of human development is the evolution of internet from an innocuous system designed to primarily transfer text documents into a burgeoning can-do-everything system. Not long before, when I had a job at a bank; it was the usual practice for customers to walk in to the bank for either depositing or withdrawing cash to meet their daily expenses. Everything was personal and most of us working at the bank had some knowledge about our customers. Today, with fast internet services like the ATT Uverse internet, customers rarely visit the bank, sans those who have very large transactions that need personal interaction.
Although most of use gradually lost touch with our customers over a period, which certainly is a loss at a personal level, the fact that transactions are faster, accurate and more benefitting cannot be lost sight off. As a result of computerization there are fewer books and papers that we turnover to write, if at all we do. All this may seem that we are losing and getting a little impersonal but the benefits far outweigh the losses. If I indeed began making a list of services that internet has made it a reality, then I did have no less than a hundred page before me to show you.


The principal benefits of using internet are so many that it will hardly sound practical if I tried listing them, and anyways, the principal reason why I write is to let those who don’t understand and use them as much as they should be, use it in a world driven by digital services and computers. Here below are some typical work that internet has make it happen, and more efficiently too.

1. The volume of business transacted on a given day has expanded exponentially. If you tried doing this volume of work manually as it used to be, a decade before when there weren’t enough cash vending machines as we have today, then everyone at the banks will hard be enough even to just pay out cash. The Vendor machines apart, it is the internet that we have to be thankful to, because customers are no longer required to travel to their bank.
2. One of the other services that deserve attention is the inter bank transactions reconciliation processes done manually many years ago. It normally took months if not years for banks to prepare statements when funds were transferred from a bank to another other bank, and between branches within the same banks. The internet has helped bankers to bid bye to this often lethargic process, and now almost all transactions are reconciled instantly. That means customers get instant reports, and banks get to be safer.
3. Have you ever imagined why banks had denied you loans in the past, even when you deserved one? If you had inquired a little deeper, you would also have found that the principal reason often is that the banks had no means to check your credit rating. Not so anymore; credit rating agencies now keep real-time information on their computers and bankers get access to your credit standing instantly. This helps both the customer and the bank; banks can lend money, after all that is the purpose why they are there, and the customer gets the loan in a fraction of time that took years, before.
4. The mother of all reasons to say thank you to internet is you don’t have to carry cash in your person, save for the small transactions you do at the corner drug store. Internet has helped us usher in an era of digital money, that unlike paper currency don’t need to be printed on expensive papers, don’t need to be counted by humans, and most important cannot be stolen. The day is not far off when all paper currency would have disappeared and replaced with digital values and stored in a safe server that you cannot see, but can be used for buying your daily needs.

Nathan Brown is a freelancer and likes to write on internet, banking and ATT Uverse Internet