In the recent film "Jerry Maguire," the sports agent played by Tom Cruise is goaded by one of his pro football-player clients to scream repeatedly: "Show me the money!"
And after more than a decade of banks spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and refine the concept of banking via personal computer, many in the industry are uttering the same exclamation.
By most accounts, home banking is finally coming of age. Thanks to the Internet, consumers have found many practical uses for the modems that are now standard equipment on nearly all new PCs sold today. Millions of home PC users now regularly go on-line to get news, chat, and cyber-shop.
Home banking seems to riding the wave as well. In a study on home banking trends due to be published this month, a New York-based market research firm, Jupiter Communications, estimates that more than two million people in the United States now do at least some of their banking via PC, and that number is projected to increase to a whopping 3.3 million by the end of this year.
Bankers are heartened by this trend, as they still painfully remember their efforts to introduce home banking in the mid-1980s, when they succeeded in attracting only a few thousand committed technophiles. Now at least some financial institutions figure it's payback time for their hefty technology investments, and are tacking on fees for on-line bill payment and even, in some cases, electronic access to account information.
Many cyber-consumers, however, are resisting these fees, arguing that they are saving banks money by not visiting branches or contacting telephone call centers.
Some analysts see the no-charge argument eventually winning the day."It appears to us that the fees bank charge for home banking are continually dropping toward zero," said Scott Smith, director of the digital commerce group at Jupiter.
Mr. Smith, who previously worked at Wachovia Bank, said that a third of the approximately 50 U.S. banks that now offer some type PC banking charge nothing for account access or bill payment. "Home banking is coming out as a cost displacement thing, and the industry is going to have to deal with it."
Many bankers counter that consumers should at least be charged for bill payment services via PC, pointing out the convenience factor and the savings consumers reap from not having to pay postage.
The problem is that consumers don't draw a distinction between electronic bill payment and account access, Mr. Smith said. "I think they mix it all together in their heads, and they see PC bill payment eliminating the paper checks banks have to process."
But the reality is that while the consumer's side of home banking is now all electronic, many PC-initiated payments still end up as checks being cut and mailed by the bank.
Instead of charging fees to offset the costs of providing home banking, some observers suggest banks should look beyond their prosaic deposit accounts and cross-sell on-line consumers more profitable credit and investment products.
For example, a new report by Killen & Associates, a consulting firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., predicts that up to 30% of all automobile loans will be originated via the Internet by 2001.
"It seems to be that many more enabling tools are being put into place to allow banks to offer their whole suite of products," Jupiter's Mr. Smith said. "The entire bank is coming out of the PC."
