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Information Technology News Online banking users want more security
Information Technology News Online banking users want more security | Online banking users want more security |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Tuesday, 30 January 2007 | |
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5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The problem with that is that it brings the risk that a transaction will be stopped at the least convenient time. For example, some people rely on online banking when travelling overseas - I recently heard of a case where an business owner travelling in Asia tried to use Internet banking to meet his company's payroll obligations, only to be blocked by his bank. In that example, the bank probably could have reached its customer by phone to confirm the transaction, but that might not work if it had been a holidaymaker trying to pay some bills or reduce a credit card balance. That's not to say that such measures can't work, just that banks need to take special care when implementing them. But when something does go wrong, we're inclined to blame the bank. Only three percent said they should be liable for whatever happens to their bank account, while 55 percent said the bank should be liable in any case. I've got some sympathy for that position, as it was the banks that promoted online banking through low or no fees, long queues in branches, and even branch closures. A aspect of the survey that I found particularly difficult to interpret was the changes between 2005 and 2006 regarding phishing. The proportion of people saying they had never heard of the term rose from 28 to 33 percent. The confidence interval is +/- 2.39, so it's not much of a stretch to say that the response might not have changed significantly, at least in the everyday rather than the statistical sense. But the number of people that say they have ever received a phishing email also fell from 56 to 43 percent - a substantial change in anybody's book. So what does that mean? The only interpretation I can come up with is that the latest sample included enough people that had only been using the Internet in general and online banking in particular for a relatively short period. One final piece of relatively good news: only 28 percent of respondents said the number of phishing emails reaching them had increased, compared with 36 percent reporting a decrease. Presumably anti-spam efforts are having some effect in blocking these messages. Disclosure: the writer holds National Australia Bank shares.{moscomment} |
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