When seeking financial services it is important to look for a full service bank that can offer the customer a wide range of choices for acquiring loans and saving money at competitive interest rates. On the east coast where banking institutions are highly concentrated into small geographic areas finding the right bank is a particularly difficult task as many banks offer different services and varying interest rates to investors. Seeking a bank in Massachusetts for example, may be different than seeking similar services in New York. Full service banks offer two or three levels of saving and checking accounts as well as investment and business banking services to cater to the community in addition to the individual. The most important service that the banks have to offer in order to be at par with all other competitor banks is the Online banking service, this saves the customer from the hassle of queues, hours to complete the banking transaction, travel to the bank searching for parking place and lots of paper work to go along with that.

Online checking

Some banks even provide a service where you can pay your bills online vis-à-vis a checking account or saving account. You can setup creditor's accounts, addresses and account numbers to be printed out on each check shipped. There are even some banks that will electronically send the check directly to their account for a nominal fee. Most electronic banking can be free depending on the minimum account requirements are met. Otherwise, electronic banking can cost up to $10 per month for the convenience to send money and manage your account via the web.

In our move towards a paperless society, banks have begun to stop shipping back cleared checks to their account holders. These cleared checks can be found on the Internet and printed out should they need access to these records. Some banks also will not ship their monthly statements as they too can be printed out on the web as well.

Interest bearing accounts

Some checking accounts, savings accounts and IRA's can also be managed via the Internet. Account holders can move money between accounts and add money to their savings accounts electronically without ever visiting a teller or the local branch.

Convenience

One of the greatest conveniences is being able to reconcile your accounts with the popular personal finance software such as MS Money and Quicken. Banks have ways to create files that can be imported into these software products so that balancing the account is done for them with little intervention. The web makes it very handy should you forget to record items into your register and will do it all for you with a couple clicks of the mouse.

Unfortunately, certain clever criminals have made the very notion of online banking inherently risky. Using a system known as "phishing", these unscrupulous types have sent out millions of e-mail messages that appear to be from legitimate banking institutions, asking customers for personal information, such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers. Many people have replied to these messages without realizing that they are not from their bank, but from someone who wants to steal information from them.

An even worse problem is that of "pharming" where malicious code directs customers who are trying to find a bank's Website to a site that the criminals have set up that looks just like the real one. This one, however, is only there to steal information.

This has led to some customers losing money, as the crooks have been able to infiltrate their bank accounts using the stolen information. An even worse outcome is that there is not a bit more unease among all consumers about engaging in financial transactions online.

There are a number of solutions in the works. Some of them involve more detailed questions of customers as the log in, so that their identities can be more accurately confirmed and so that the customers can be assured that they are at the right Website. The hardware solutions are more effective, as they require that the customer use a physical device to connect, such as a card that displays a number that changes once a minute that only the real bank's server knows. The problems with these solutions are cost and the problem of physically distributing the devices to the public. Internet commerce is still in its youth, and these problems will eventually go away as the entire system becomes more sophisticated. In the meantime, customers who bank online should make a habit of becoming more cautions as they use the Web for financial purposes. Check out the secure way to online banking in MA .

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