Internet Banking In India
September 4th, 2010 Filed under: Personal Finance Tips — Personal Finance Author
Banking services in India were just restricted to Deposit of Cheques and withdrawal of cash up until 2 decades ago.
With economic liberalization setting in about 2 decades ago, most of the old economy banks – which were government controlled – tried to keep pace with the rapidly changing economic scenario, and a couple of them succeeded in it too.
However the greatest spin-off of the new economic order was the emergence of Private Sector banks. These banks were extremely people friendly, offered variety of services, cut down the red-tape prevalent earlier, created single point contact for a whole range of products and services, introduced computerization in every aspect of their operation.
It must be mentioned that the Indian Banking System’s Apex body, namely Reserve Bank of India, played an extremely proactive and positive role in the paradigm shift that is now being witnessed by the populace of the country. In fact Reserve bank of India made it mandatory in the year 1990 to implement computerization in their entire sphere of activities, and this single biggest decision was in the forefront of all the technological changes that were embraced by the banking sector. Initially this decision was imposed as a pre-condition for new generation private sector banks, but soon most of the government sector too followed suit, seeing the immense benefit, and increase in the productivity that this decision brought about.
In the old economic order, the consumer was required to go to the bank, but the reverse happened with liberalization. Now banks came to the doorstep of the consumer, understand his needs, and many a times tailor-made banking solutions to suit to the customer. The banks now hired professionals not just from economic background, but from Engineering and other multitude of scientific streams, in order to deeply understand the unique requirements of both the retail consumers as well as large multinational corporations.
They went a step ahead, and felt that consumers need not come all the way to the bank for mundane and routine tasks, and to this effect introduced Internet banking system.
They also started playing the role of payment collection centers for various services such as CAT Admission Forms for IIT entrance exams, managing the initial public offers launched by various organizations, and many such services.
All these were possible because of enabling most of their services internet enabled, and due to rapid computerization.
Internet banking has also made a huge positive contribution in integrating Indian Banks with the banking system of the rest of the world in a much faster and effective manner. This in turn, has immensely helped the Indian Industry in doing business with the world’s new economic order.
Today banks in India are more of a financial supermarket, with customer friendly officers paying personal attention to the customers, and appropriately elegant ambience to match the transformation that the banks have undergone in the past two decades.
Two of the most popular examples are HDFC Net banking and Axis bank net banking that have rolled out Internet banking in full measure, benefiting the consumers at large.
