Internet banking will not be a fee-free haven for long. But banks are pushing harder than ever to get customers online, and soon the Web won't be an alternative - it'll be the only option. ZDNet's special report examines the plusses and pitfalls of Australia's leading banks and their efforts to lure you online.

Executive Summary
Internet Banking is not the end of standing in queues, but with ongoing development, things are getting better as more and more functionality is being incorporated to Web sites.

St George
A strong offering, but with room for improvement. While the site does much of what you would expect, it is limited by its lack of support for ad hoc payments. See how St George rates against other e-banking sites in the ZDNet e-banking special.

Westpac
Given tighter integration of its peripheral services, Westpac could give the top e-banking sites a run for their money. ZDNet e-banking special takes a look at Westpac's current state as well as innovative future offerings.

ANZ
If you are looking to take your banking online, ANZ is a good bet. A friendly interface, discounted PC offer and Web development assistance are some of the perks they have to offer. Check out their ranking on the ZDNet e-banking scale.

National Australia
NAB offers a good service, but the lack of Mac compatibility, and the unnecessary requirement for a downloaded application, may hinder success. Check how they rate on the ZDNet e-banking scale.

Commonwealth Bank
CBA's simple interface makes it a solid choice for novices, but its lack of advanced functionality inhibits the expert user. Look to the future for some major improvements.

Bendigo Bank
While the site is solid, the increase in shortcuts and saving functionality could greatly increase their market.

Citibank
Simplicity of getting online isn't supported by Citibank's online package. Can future technologies improve its offering, or should you be looking elsewhere?

Suncorp Metway
A great look-and-feel and easy navigation make Suncorp Metway's site an excellent choice for the online banking beginner. Can it's plans for the future bring it into the major leagues?

Summary table
ZDNet compares eight Australian e-banking sites in terms of current features, usability, and future developments. Take a look at which site tops the polls in this comprehensive summary.

Executive summary

Sure, there are corporate software packages from many of the banks that allow you full and sophisticated services, however the Internet banking offering is often positioned as a simplified version of these packages. But with Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) becoming more and more sophisticated, and the continuing branch closures, the Internet Banking services still need to lift their game.

This review of a selection of the Internet banking services revealed many similarities in feature and functions, but also significant differences in their usability and simplicity. All of them are being regularly updated and enhanced, and are closely approaching their older brothers, found in the major banks.

Fees for using Internet banking are cheaper than over the counter charges, so there's every incentive to get online. As for security, banks use a minimum of 128 bit encryption.

Because most of the sites shared the same functionality, our primary consideration was the extent to which the services made life easier for the SME, who is typically short on time and not technologically strong. Our strong focus on usability meant that being feature rich didn't mean being the best.

Features and functions looked for included:

• Uploading payroll files
• Download to the accounting packages
• Large direct transfers, including batches to pay suppliers, salaries, and other debtors
• Scheduled payments for salaries and other recurring costs
• Online statement facilities for at least three months
• Support for multiple signature accounts

St George

St George provides the standard services including checking your balances, viewing your transactions, transfer funds between St.George accounts, and transfer funds to other nominated third party accounts. But this is a manual process as it requires you to nominate a payee on a form and send it into the bank, or call up the bank. Removing a payee is the same process. So unfortunately, there's no easy way to make an ad hoc payment to another person's account.

You can transfer up to AU$25 000 per day per customer, and set up future dated, or scheduled payments. You can do the same for groups of accounts, such as for payroll.

BPay and its history are available, and you can store payees and schedule transactions. It can also be used to pay for trades conducted through St.George Quicktrade.

You can access all your accounts including cheque, savings, personal/home loan and term deposit accounts. For the end of year books, you can also check how much interest has been earned on these accounts.

In a first, you can buy and redeem e-cash to spend over the Internet if you don't want to use your credit card.

Like the NAB, you can make term deposits by specifying the amount, and then searching for a suitable product. But you can't elect to pay interest to the new account to simplify rolling over the investment.

Future Directions
St.George didn't want to reveal too much about its future plans, but indicated that handling multiple signatures and read-only access for others are being reviewed, as well as other functionality.

Usability
The service was fairly slow, but you can download the Internet banking application to your hard disk to speed up access.

St.George has built an interface more like an application (it's written in Java, like the NAB), rather than a standard Web page, but the design doesn't take full advantage of the approach. As with other services, there are many redundancies in displaying details that could easily be simplified.

The display of transactions could be improved with a column for debits and one for credits. The credit card account doesn't show the limit, less charges, to give you the available credit.

When making a transfer between a savings account and credit card, a message is presented stating that payments may take up to one day, which is a little strange if you've got a bill to pay - and most people do it on the last day. Also an oversight is the lack of a Biller search - You need to know the number.

There is some customisation of the application, but it doesn't make it any easier.

The help text claims that exporting is available for quicken, money, and CSV, but we couldn't find it anywhere.

Macintosh customers are supported.

Conclusion
The application approach could make for a very strong offering, but there's a room for improvement. It does most of what you want, but the lack of support for ad hoc payments limits its usefulness.

Overall Rating 3.25 / 5.

Westpac

With Westpac you can perform all the standard transactions such as transfer between funds, BPay, and Pay anyone. Pay Anyone has a selectable amount of AU$1,000 or $5,000 per day.

Transaction history is available for the last 100 days, and you can view and print statements from the last 12 months.

In a function not often seen in Internet banking, you can set up special access for your accountant where you can specify the access level. For example, you can allow full access, or read only.

Westpac also has a specialised fund transfer for ATO's GST payments. This is basically BPay the ATO pre-programmed, but also includes your unique identification code for the payment making GST payments a simple process.

For those with a personal Westpac account, you can link it with your business account to see everything at once.

Westpac also offers the broadest range of expert formats including MYOB v9 for PC and Mac, Quicken v6 and v7, Excel, MS Money 98 and 99/2000, OFX, and a range of different date formats, depending on your software.

Future Directions
Westpac is certainly keeping busy with its business services including the forthcoming online credit applications and B2Buy to help SMEs simplify and reduce procurement costs. It also plans to introduce online foreign exchange capabilities.

In terms of Internet banking capabilities, pay anyone is being increased to a AU$25,000 daily limit, and there'll be facilities to import your payroll file, make batched payment templates, scheduled transactions and support for multiple signatures accounts.

Usability
The usability of the Westpac online banking was good as the design was simple and clear to understand. This was mainly because of the smaller set of functionality currently on offer.

Error handling was inefficient, and took you to a screen to report the error, rather than keep you on the same page and show you where the mistakes were made. After clicking 'OK', you return to the previous page and many of your settings are lost - you have to start again.

The export function was confusing with the way the range of options was presented. It was easy to make two contradictory selections without knowing which would appear in the export. Long dates were expressed as 'ccyy' referring to the inclusion of the century, instead of just using 'yyyy'.

Westpac also provides support for Macintosh customers.

Conclusion
If the peripheral services were all more tightly integrated, this service would give ANZ a run for its money. The new services coming should make it a solid offering.

Overall rating 3.5 / 5

National Australia Bank

When on the National's Internet banking homepage, you then have to download a small application (PCs only, because of some Mac compatibility problems in the Java Runtime environment) before you can get started. The download took some three or four minutes at 56k, and only required clicking 'OK' to a few screens along the way. Overall, a straightforward process - so long as you do exactly as the instructions say.

After you enter your user number, a pop-up window displays a keyboard with alphanumeric keys. This is to enter your password. While this provides an additional level of security, it means that visually impaired people can't access the NAB's Internet banking. It's also a hassle.

The NAB seemed the most security conscious of all the banks. The downloaded application means that instead of the standard 128 bit encryption, NAB uses 168 bits. There is also a Digital Certificate that needs to be downloaded to your PC. The digital certificate makes it a cumbersome process to do Internet banking at another PC, effectively ruling out banking at home.

In terms of features, you can check your balances, make transfers to your other linked accounts, as well as any other accounts within the NAB, or at other Australian banks. There is a maximum of AU$5,000 per day allowed for transfers to other bank's accounts.

Regular payments, and future dated payments can be made up to 18 months in advance.

You can check your last 100 days of transactions, and export your transactions, in MS Money, Quicken, and CSV format.

You can open a term deposit, while you can see the current rates, you can't select from the presented list. Further, you don't get access to any special rates, such as for professionals.

While there is a general fees area, there are no details on the precise fees for Internet banking.

You can also give restricted or unrestricted access to others in the company, such as your accountant.

Larger organisations can use National Online Business, and National Online Corporate, both of which contain significantly more features.

Future Directions
The most significant change for the NAB is moving to a browser based service. This is likely to appear next year and will provide access for Macintosh based customers. Other functionality will be coming, but the details were not given.

Usability
The download means the interface could include more features than a standard Web page. However, this didn't mean that it was any more usable than its rivals. Although you can sort transactions according to date, this was about the extent of the enhanced usability - but it's nothing that can't be done in a standard Web page.

While you can check your recent transactions, there's no total on the screen to show the current balance - this is only available at the summary level. When checking out a transactions history, it defaults to showing the last 15 days, and figuring out how to change the date range took some time.

You get to select your various conditions in the term deposit window, but you can't see the current rates to make a more informed choice.

A couple of bugs occurred where the application became unstable. We closed the Internet banking, and then were informed to close all browser windows. It took a few goes and then it was working again.

Conclusion
A good offering, but a few problems such as the lack of Macintosh compatibility, and the unnecessary requirement for a downloaded application. High levels of security reduces some flexibility.

Rating 3 / 5.

ANZ

ANZ provides discounted Gateway PCs, as well as online tools for building yourself a Web site, GST payment accounts and business benchmarking tools. It also provides procurement services and eGate for merchants, as well as a rural focus.

In terms of functionality, you can transfer between your accounts, pay anyone at another Australian bank and make schedule payments. You can make multiple payments (five at a time), as well as pay five bills at a time. Unfortunately, you can't save these multiple payment groups for future use (e.g. as salary payments), or make ad-hoc multiple payment - you need to add them to your payee list first. The pay anyone function quickly allows single ad-hoc payments, and an option to save the new payee to your list.

You can quickly view your past transfers and perform cheque reconciliation. As with the other banks, there is also a secure e-mail facility. For transaction history, you can view up to 120 days' worth.

You can also download your recent transactions into Quicken and Microsoft Money, and view your interest history.

You can personalise the Internet banking, such as changing the session time out between five and 15 minutes, in case you leave your PC unattended, changing the order of the accounts, and renaming the accounts to something meaningful.

Future Services
ANZ describes their services as being in the early stages. Upcoming changes include: increasing pay anyone limit from $1,000 or $5,000 to $10,000 for personal customers and from $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 to $15,000 and $25,000 for business customers. They have also promised some significant enhancements in the very near future.

Usability
In general, this interface was very well put together. It's clear and simple, with a good look and feel. Your account balance(s) are always present on the screen below the left hand navigation.

There were a couple of minor issues when entering dates, such as 10/11/00 would not be automatically expanded to 10/11/2000, rather we got an error and had to fix it ourselves.

For viewing transactions, a couple of semantic issues meant that the 'last seven days transactions' does not include the current day, while the 'last five transactions for today' option would not include the 6th or more transaction made today.

While you can update most of your personal details online, changing your phone number and address requires a secure e-mail to be sent to the bank.

The system was also a little slow, even over a 56k modem. ANZ provides support for Macintosh customers.

Conclusion
If you're looking to get online, then you can't go past the ANZ. They're clearly ahead of the others with an offering including website development and a discounted PC offer.

Rating 4/5.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

NetBank is updating its functionality, but at the moment the functions include transaction history for your last 150 transactions. You can also transfer money between your own accounts, but not to other banks' accounts. There is also BPay for your bills combined with storing of frequent billers for quick payment. At the moment, there is no facility to make scheduled payments.

You can also export your transactions in Quicken (US and Australian), as well as Microsoft Money and CSV.

NetBank also provides you with a summary of interest and taxes for your end of year activities.

The search facility allows searching with specific accounts, date ranges and dollar amounts. Unfortunately, you can't search by transaction type.

Other services include ordering a chequebook, statements, and changing your password. You can also link your credit cards and access your last three months of transactions.

Future Directions
During the study, we also had access to a new pilot site containing many enhancements to the current service. While no date has been set, the new functions include pay anyone, scheduled payments for future dated transactions and recurring transactions, and batched transfers.

Usability
Netbank has a very simple and straightforward interface, with many shortcuts. Most of what you want is just one click away, and it's also a very fast service with download times being among the fastest of all the banks.

When selecting an account for a transaction, the current balance is included in the list so you know where your money is.

The BPay area requires that you set up a Biller first, making it a multiple step process to make an ad-hoc payment or paying Billers that change their billing code and CRN frequently. You do, however, have quick access to recent bills paid to make sure you're on top of things.

Viewing and editing accounts is a simultaneous process, making maintenance of your Internet banking very easy.

NetBank provides support for Macintosh customers.

Conclusion
Overall a very simple, yet strong interface. This one is well suited to the novice, but has many shortcuts for the expert. However, it's not quite as well rounded as ANZ's offering.

Rating 3.75 / 5

Bendigo Bank

You can access all your Bendigo Bank accounts, check balances and view historical transactions. You can transfer funds between you accounts, and pay anyone at another Australian bank. For transfers, you can set up scheduled transfers for those recurring payments.

Pay anyone is limited to either AU$1,000 or $5,000 and there is feedback on screen for how much is left, and small business can request an increase. Unfortunately, you can't store payees, or set up batched payments - this limits its usefulness.

Searches allow you to find transactions within a date range, dollar value range or reference number, however, you can't search for transaction types, which would be useful. You can get access to a minimum of 11 months' history, mainly based on Bendigo's movement to an online service.

BPay is also available for one-off or scheduled payments.

Like the other banks, you can order statements, chequebooks, and send secure e-mails to the bank.

Bendigo Bank also offers notification services for when your balance falls below, or rises above specific amounts. Notification is by fax or e-mail.

Unfortunately, you can't export your details to your own finance package.

Future Directions
Bendigo Bank plans to consolidate Pay Anyone, BPay, and transfers into a single process to simplify things for customers. There will also be support for multiple signature accounts, where both or more have to sign. In addition, file downloading to MYOB, QuickBooks and CSV formats will be supported, as well as payroll file uploading. Share Trading will also be introduced.

Usability
The system was fairly slow, even with an ISDN connection. Although the other banks also use an encrypted connection, this was noticeably slower.

When paying bills, there's no indication of your account balance, to check you have enough funds. You need to go back to the account balance area, and then back to BPay.

Seeing your transactions is a three click process, rather than giving you quick access to what you need most frequently - the last month's transactions.

The schedule transactions function is limited to a single future payment, or monthly. There is no option for a weekly, quarterly, six monthly, or annual frequencies of payments.

The steps to send an e-mail were not immediately obvious, and took us a few moments to work out.

Conclusion
A solid offering, with a simple interface but could be improved by some shortcuts, and saving regular payees. Customers in rural settings will get most of what they want, especially for multiple signatures.

Rating 3 / 5.

Citibank

However, that's where its strengths ended. Like most of the other banks, CitiDirect allows you to do the usual things like statements, transferring funds between your own, and to other accounts. You can transfer funds to accounts in other banks, and use BPay for your bills. And if you have regular payments to make, you can set up 'standing orders', though we think they should have called them 'scheduled payments'.

If you have your own finance package, you can download your information to Quicken and Microsoft Money. For other packages, you can download in OFX (Open Financial Exchange) and CSV (Comma Separated Values) formats.

For SMEs with international requirements, you can, in what appears to be unique to online banking, transfer funds to other countries. However, this is actually done through a manual process, where a bank staff member manually performs the transfer for you. You can also order bank drafts and cheques.

Like all the other banks, you can send secure e-mails and order chequebooks, statements, as well as change your PIN and contact details online.

Future Services
Citibank declined to provide any indication of its future directions with its online offering.

Usability
Unfortunately, compared with the other banks, the usability and simplicity of Citibank was the lowest of the group. Many of the transactions take three or four steps to complete, instead of one or two.

In the accounts area, there is an unnecessary separation of Account Details form Account Activity (meaning transactions), which could all be integrated. Individual account activities are not clearly marked as deposits or withdrawals so it's hard to tell how your spending is going.

If you want to check standing orders, this takes three clicks instead of one. To transfer money to another account, you have to set the recipient up similar to a BPay biller, instead of just entering the account and BSB. When paying Bpay, or making other transfers, adding new billers is separated from paying bills, making it a slower process for the first time, and there is no support for ad hoc transactions.

The service also had numerous compatibility problems with Netscape, which either freezes or misses information. The environment looked as though it hadn't been tested for either bugs or usability. Printing was also quite unattractive, being done in Courier font, with no bank branding.

For the expert customer, this level of redundancy could soon become a slow process, and the non-standard terms don't help.

Conclusion
This site lacks a lot of polish. If you're serious about Internet banking, then take a look around at the other offerings first. It's a shame the simplicity of getting online wasn't supported in the actual package.

Overall Rating: 2 / 5.

Suncorp

Similar to other banks, you need to be registered for telephone banking. If you already have your access code, you can then select the accounts you'd like to have access to.

Once logged in, the current version of Suncorp's online banking provides: Account balances, recent transaction history, Bill payment, both immediate and future dated, and funds transfer to any Suncorp Metway deposit account, home loan or personal loan. At the moment, you can see the last 25 transactions, but this is being updated to the last 12 months in the coming version.

You can also manager your loan accounts, and access features such as funds transfer and bill payments. Like the NAB, you can open ten rm deposits, but there's no quick link to the current rates.

Once displayed you can download the transactions in Quicken, Money, or ASCII format.

While you can access most accounts, unfortunately for the small business you cannot access Small Business Loans, Commercial Banking Loan or Lease accounts.

In the service centre, you can change your details including the accounts accessed and personal details.

Customisation includes balance notifications to advise you when your accounts' balance falls below and or rises above a certain amount, as well as being overdrawn, or close to your limit. Secure messages with a claim of a 24 hour response time and Payment of Insurance Premiums are also available.

Future Services
Suncorp is currently upgrading its service to include support for accounts which require 'Two to sign', as well as bulk payments.

Under Bulk payments, you can set up 10 groups of 30 payees. Before the payments are made, you can authorise them, and make any variations. Small business will be pleased with the ability to import a payroll file, but make sure you apply for an Australian Payments Clearing Association number first.

The maximum amount for transferring to another bank's account has been increased to AU$20,000, making it useful for salaries and other large payments.

Usability
The transaction history screen provides flexibility in how much you want to see, but if you want a quick glance of your most recent, you have to make a minimum of four clicks. But at least there's a column each for debits and credits, making it easy to get a sense of how your spending is going.

There is an advanced search where you can search for specific transaction types, as well as a cheque search by cheque number. If you don't know the cheque number, then you can do an advanced search for cheque types. However, much of this could be easily integrated directly into the transaction details screen.

When making a funds transfer, you have to enter a password. At first this was unclear, but we then realised it was a second password as a level of security. You need to specifically apply for this, and there was no mention of this inside the Internet banking service, except in the demo.

When setting up a frequent Biller, you need to know the code. There is no search as found on most of the other online services.

Suncorp requirements are for a windows-based PC only, and makes no guarantees in supporting non-PC customers.

Conclusion
Apart from a couple of minor navigation issues at the account level that would make things quicker, the interface was implemented in a consistent manner, making it easier for the novice customer. It also had a nice look and feel about it in most areas.

Overall Rating 3.5 / 5.

Summary table

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