One Year Ago in Online Banking Report

In April 2000, OBR began with the headline, Net Banking Catches Fire: 15% of U.S. Adults to Bank Online by Year-end. We also noted, “We’ve been waiting five years to write that title.”

At that time, we had just endured a six-month period of ominous stories about account attrition and user apathy, much of it stemming from a suspect Cyber Dialogue report that showed virtually no gain in online banking usage in the prior 12-month period. Quite the opposite, we were seeing a surge in demand, as useful online services from financial institutions and credit card companies, plus specialty services from X.com/PayPal, caught on with Net users.

It turns out we called this one right. Online banking usage continued to soar in 2000, easily beating our prediction of 15% penetration by year-end. Today, just one year later, online banking usage is approaching 20% of the population. We’ll look closer at the number in an upcoming report.

                        OBR, April 2000

Five Years Ago in Online Banking Report

In the spring of 1996, online banking was just beginning to attract attention in the mainstream press. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always positive. Reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Glitches Short-Circuit Miracle of Paying Bills Online and New York Times I’d Rather Use a Checkbook, both personally experienced the shortcomings of electronic bill payment and wrote scathing articles about the service.

The articles were prompted by a serious of service problems Intuit was experiencing with it’s new bill payment processing company, Intuit Services Corp., later sold to Checkfree.

Intuit’s startup woes motivated us to write a feature entitled, Ten Strategies for a Safe Startup, which extolled the virtues of a slow rollout to iron out the bugs before they made the front page of the New York Times. It’s still good advice for anyone conducting a major system or feature change.

                        OBR Mar. 1996