India’s leap towards becoming a digital economy is being praised by countries around the world today, even as the global economy stares at recession. Building systems that can conduct online banking at a mass scale has been pivotal in bringing this digital transformation, but India faces multiple challenges in e-banking even today that are holding us from growing to our full potential. Until these problems are tackled by the government and private banking institutions, India’s dream of attaining futuristic digitisation won’t reach the desired result. Here are a few challenges in e-banking that we must overcome.
Challenges in E-Banking
Technical shortcomings
Every bank needs reliable technical support to ensure smooth transactions at any given time of day. Unfortunately, India currently lacks the technical firepower and skilled force to conduct these transactions at a mass scale throughout the day. In the last few years, the government has ensured that a majority of people living in poverty get their own bank accounts for maximum benefit coverage. Growth estimates show that in the next decade, a large majority of the poor will transition to the middle class, which means that our net banking systems must be ready to increase their transactional capacity on a much bigger scale. Not working on our technical prowess and capacity will create many net-banking problems in the future, which will be difficult to overcome with our growing population and banking needs.
Security issues
Security is the most important concern in banking, and especially in net banking. While many top economies in the world are aggressively working on overcoming security issues, building futuristic digital security systems still remains one of the biggest challenges in e-banking. However, all government and private banks are actively working to spread awareness about fraud attempts that still take place. This includes sending frequent alerts to bank account holders, reminding them not to divulge their KYC details to anyone under any circumstances. In addition to this, they are also advised to habitually change their bank passwords from time to time through apps. Along with phishing, banks are also highlighting the misusing of UPI ‘collect requests,’ wherein users receive fake messages to collect money. This awareness needs to take place at a mass scale, otherwise, no amount of heightened net-bank security will make much of a difference.
Rise in customer expectations
With the rise of e-banking users comes the rise of customer expectations. Now that net payments can take place in a matter of a few screen taps and seconds, customers also want time and effort-reducing methods to conduct their other banking activities. It is thus a growing responsibility for banks and governments to increase the radius of e-banking and come up with more ways to save customers from making trips to the banks by enabling them to manage all banking and related activities on the internet. However, it is far easier said than done, as it will take steep technical advancements and server maintenance even if these objectives are achieved. Strategic policies will thus have to be devised and implemented to thrive under this challenge.
These are some of the basic challenges in e-banking today.