Photo by Pierre Amerlynck

Imagine this … you go to a Citibank’s branch and settle home loan instalment, go to HSBC’s branch and settle car loan instalment, next go to Standard Chartered’s branch to settle credit card payment and transfer money to a sister, an undergraduate student, and lastly, rush to a post office to settle utility bills. Sounds very tiring, isn’t it? You drive car, stuck in a traffic jam, avoiding car accident, pay toll, find parking, pay parking coupon or ticket, walk under the sun or in the rain and you get yourself exhausted. And maybe, you have to take half day leave to settle all these. Wow, so much of a half day job.

Now imagine this … you log on to an online banking website, and settle your home loan instalment, car loan instalment, credit card payment, transfer money to your sister and settle utility bills. All these happened within few minutes at your convenient time at your office, without taking leave, or at the comfort of your home.

I must tell you that I’m a big fan of online banking. I have been using it for quite sometime already and I find it is very useful. It saves my precious time – I can do many other important things, and indirectly this increases my personal productivity. It saves my transportation cost – I can save more money. It gives me comfort – I don’t need to face all those traffic jam, long queue, unfriendly weather and possibility of a car accident. And most importantly, I don’t need to push (and to endanger) my wife to go out home to do all these – I can do these without asking for leave from my boss. My wife loves me for doing all these.

I also purchase Air Asia and MAS ticket using online banking. Select flight details and enter personal details, choose direct debit from bank account, log on, make payment and the ticket purchase is confirmed. This online banking payment is getting more popular, to me, a preferred alternative to credit card payment. Malaysian online businesses are yet to offer direct debit on a larger scale as large as credit card payment but I’m sure that the time for that will come.

Some people say that online banking is risky. Tell me, what isn’t risky about offline payment? Driving car is risky – car accident, remember? Being in the bank’s premise is risky – bank robbery, sounds familiar to you? Walking with huge amount of the money in the crowd is risky – robbery, remember? The thing is that we have to know how to protect ourselves. There are ways to protect ourselves in doing online banking (which I will cover in my next article). But we are not alone in this – I see that the online banking has improved in the recent years. The banks, in order to attract more clients, have improved both online banking services and security.

Some people say that online banking is not for them because they are not IT literate. I did spend quite a long time to find answer to this. In my opinion, as long as we don’t want to learn new ways of doing things, we will keep on doing things the old ways. Look, the world has changed. The world demands us to do more things in our 24/7. Thus the time seems to move faster nowadays. Online banking helps us to free more hours and minutes of making payments for other things.

It feels like only yesterday the time when the banks started to offer utility bill payment at their counter. I was still small that time – I didn’t manage money apart from my daily pocket money. Now, in this IT age, the banks are offering payment, money transfer and investment services in online banking. Online consumers/users could also transact money between their bank account and online merchants (e.g. AirAsia) and online payment service providers (e.g. Paypal). In the nut shell, online banking is the future and I’m looking forward what else we can do with online banking.