Internet banking is one of the greatest revolutions the banking business has experienced in its entire history. Like any other Internet phenomenon, banking routines become as fast as a mouse click and the working day expands to 24 hours, every day of the year. Money never sleeps and now, neither do the banks.

All the financial institutions in Spain have online banking services to attend to their wired customers who need no convincing of the advantages these services offer.

The old dream of making bank transactions without having to queue up in a branch office began to come true thanks to telephone banking. People started to make transfers and consult their bank balances and account movements via a system based on oral passwords. With telephone banking people began to discover some of the advantages of working through a virtual system, where the only physical contact made was when cash was withdrawn from an ATM.

The Internet banking phenomenon can, without any risk of exaggeration, be likened to the advent of the railways, the steamship or the car.

I am sure that the first cars were slower than horses and that early steamships gave more problems than the classic sailing ships. Well something similar is going to happen in the banking world with the Internet. Its advantage over traditional banking is so huge that financial transactions over the Internet may not be ten times cheaper than via the traditional branch office system, as some people are saying; they may turn out to be up to a hundred times cheaper, explains one top manager from Patagon, one of the main online financial supermarkets on the Spanish market.

Apart from the convenience of a continuous service, with no need to leave your home (consultations can be made via computer from anywhere around the world), the great advantage of online banking is the price. By way of example, a transaction which in many cases would cost 2.40 euros in a branch, in an online bank could cost just 0.02 euros.

The ease with which you can find the best offer on the market in the least possible time is another of the Internet�s great advantages. It is no longer necessary to physically visit a dozen branches to make comparisons between their services. Now an internaut can find out what each bank is offering anonymously, instantly and efficiently. A comparative search on the Net can be done in two minutes, while the same job would take two hours on the phone or two days of visits to all the different branches.

After the problems experienced by many companies with the Internet business model, experts have come to the conclusion that the development of online banking will not mean the end of traditional financial activity. What it will bring about is a change in our habits, so that routine transactions will be handled via the PC, while loan applications, mortgages and similar matters will continue to be made in the branch office as usual.

Online banks have opened their doors to all kinds of financial services, so their cyber-customers can access more than 20 international stock markets while sitting at their PC, with the added advantage of having expert opinion on hand while they personalise their stock portfolio and keep up to date with financial news. Generally speaking users operating on the stock market online are charged a flat rate fee, regardless of the amount invested.

At the other end of the computer, the banks provide a personalised service to every customer while attending millions of people simultaneously. The response of each bank is instant when someone makes a transfer, consults their balance or asks for information about the different financial services available. It would be very hard to describe technically how this wait-free multiple personalisation is achieved, but the fact is that online banks attend to the requirements of millions of people with ease and agility, and all in the same tenth of a second. It is a technological miracle.

Better interest rates and lower charges
You only have to take a look at the bank reference indexes to see that Internet banking is offering the customer much more attractive interest rates and lower bank charges. For example, I-Banesto.com is offering 15 year fixed interest rate mortgages at 6%, while its big brother, Banesto, is advertising the same fixed rate mortgage at 6.50% over 12 years, or at 6.75% over 20 years.