The main banks have been busy in the past few years closing down branches. At the same time the big banks have been encouraging us to use the internet and “quick lodge” machines, as face-to-face contact with bank tellers becomes as rare as sunshine during an Irish summer.

Branches, already chronically difficult to use because of highly restrictive opening hours, have been transformed into sales offices for mortgages and investment products Now it emerges that almost two-thirds of people with access to the internet do not use online banking, according to research conducted by Amarach Consulting for Halifax bank.

This is despite the fact that almost 43pc of Irish people have access to the internet on a daily basis. The telecoms regulator, Com-Reg, says that 1.04m people are internet subscribers. Halifax cited low broadband penetration as the main reason for the poor take-up of online banking. But the problem has probably as much to do with the banks themselves as with an insufficient amounts of fibre optic wires.

People do not trust online banking. The suspicion is that the problem is much more prevalent than banks are prepared to admit. People are scared of using credit cards to make payments online and fearful of carrying out banking transactions using the internet. Last summer this newspaper uncovered a spate of phishing frauds, where people had their bank accounts cleaned out after mistakenly replying to emails they thought were from their banks requesting their PIN.

Credit card fraud, where just using your card on the net can be enough to allow someone to clone it, is a huge and growing problem. When someone is defrauded in this way there is a tendency for card issuers to quietly pay up for fear that they will put people off using credit cards for online purchasing.

Collectively banks do very little to combat online fraud. Have you seen a TV ad lately telling you what to do if confronted with a phishing email? The answer is no, but you will certainly have seen ads promoting some bank product or other.

It is hard to escape the feeling that internet security is low down the list of priorities for banks and credit card companies. No wonder then that just 14pc of people are happy to bank online, despite its convenience and the fact that the best deals are often only available online. The banks could start by being honest about the true extent of the internet security problem.

News from: Independent.ie