Essay about An overview of online banking in Russia

Submitted By KNikitina
Words: 839
Pages: 4

An overview of online banking in Russia
The development of the financial services in Russia plays a crucial role in its economy. Nowadays in order to be successful and up-to-date, to be able to keep existing customers and attract new ones, banks use the Internet to achieve their goals. Constant new developments in technology force banks to be flexible and to respond immediately to the changing environment. Tough competition in the banking industry indicates that banks have to pay attention to every factor contributing to their success. According to Bamrara & Singh (2012), the key component of this is customer satisfaction. One way to keep customer satisfaction at high level is to secure customers’ data and protecting it from data thefts and other frauds. If the banks can guarantee the absence of security holes and therefore protect the customers’ data, how likely is the usage of online banking to increase? Apart from security, customers are prone to use the technology they trust (Montazemi & Saremi, 2013). This can be achieved by increasing the financial awareness of the society, and reducing technology and regulatory constraints. This paper attempts to identify the correlations between these three factors by generating a survey of the customers’ preferences and perceptions towards online banking.
As a global system, the Internet has a tremendous influence on economy, business and finance. The changes in these industries include, among others, the development of Internet banking. As a rule, western banks provide a wide range of different internet services for their customers, whereas in Russia the use of Internet technologies is not very sufficient.
From 1990s, more and more financial institutes use Internet for providing services. In 1995, western banks gave their customers an opportunity to maintain their account no matter where they were, the only condition being the access to the Internet. Such an activity was named Internet banking. However, this notion means much more than the ability to maintain a bank account and nowadays Internet or online banking is defined as the delivery of banking services through the open-access computer network (the Internet) directly to customers’ home or private address (Lau, 1997). Target audience of the internet banking are those individuals or entities who possess a computer, some knowledge in how to use is, internet access and a bank account. The most important elements that may diminish target audiences are underdeveloped information technologies (IT) in Russia; low usage of the internet; ageing of the population; people’s mentality in terms of suspicion towards new banking technologies. [5.1]
Internet banking is aimed at increasing the customer service quality and satisfaction, and has many benefits, for example, it is cost-saving, fast and accessible for the customers 24/7, so they are not limited by a bank’s opening hours (Jayawardhena & Foley, 2000). Besides that, Internet banking provides absolute self-service that may attract new customers who reside in different locations, which were not covered by bank branches before the adoption of Internet banking (White & Nteli, 2004). What is of equal importance, banks have an opportunity to upload all crucial information regarding changes or current news, all necessary for the customers. However, with the increasing use of the Internet people become more and more demanding and showing need for more convenient and easily navigable sites (Eriksson & Nilsson, 2007), therefore the banks have to keep their sites up-to-date. The evolution perspectives of any system are characterized by internal and external factors that