The increasing use of fake e-mail messages and the recent spate of data security breaches at banks, merchants, and card processing companies are making consumers wary of banking online.
Some of these people are so fearful of putting their personal data at risk that they are using bank Web sites less often, especially for paying bills, a pair of surveys found.
Bankers say these fears are groundless, but to customers, "perception is reality," said Thomas Noyes, the director of online and payment services at Wachovia Corp.
Someone will be less inclined to use a banking Web site if they think it will make their account more vulnerable to unauthorized transactions, Mr. Noyes said.
Gartner Inc. found in a survey of 5,000 consumers that 28% had changed some aspect of their online banking habits.
Fourteen percent said they had stopped paying bills online, 4% said they refuse to use their bank's online banking site at all, and 77% said they were logging on less often, according to Gartner, which published the survey results last week.
Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at Gartner, of Stamford, Conn., said that consumers are very aware of the potential for fraud and that more than half of them think they have received a phishing e-mail. These messages, purportedly from the recipients' bank, direct them to a counterfeit Web site where they are asked to reveal personal details that could be used for identity theft.
Ms. Litan's research indicates that phishing accounted for $929 million of personal losses in the 12-month period that ended in May, and she said that consumer fear is the main reason people are less willing to use online banking services.
Tom Kelly, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., said new online banking users' behavior is predictable.
"People work down a comfort continuum, so the first thing you do when you come online with a bank is you look at your accounts online," Mr. Kelly said. Customers then graduate to transferring money between bank accounts before they become comfortable trying online bill-pay, he said.
Ms. Litan said that people cutting back on their e-banking use often follow this same pattern in reverse. "You drop the edge applications," such as bill-pay, "before you would drop the main ones," such as looking at account balances and transactions, she said.
People fearful that bill-pay could create a way for thieves to funnel money out of the accounts "are not that worried about just looking at their balances," she said.
Banks say that lower volume for bill payment is bad news, because bill-pay helps to drive overall use of online banking. Sixty-seven percent of 4,392 adult Web users said in a survey published last week by MasterCard International's Remote Payment and Presentment Service division that they bank online just to pay their bills.
Tom Carey, the MasterCard division's vice president of new business development, said customers believe online bill-pay "can conceivably be a target for fraud."
Forty-nine percent of the survey audience said they believe their personal data is at risk anytime they are online. Eighteen percent were worried that they would be affected by phishing, while 7% said that their identifying details were most at risk when using a bank's online bill-pay service.
The MasterCard survey was conducted in April and May by Harris Interactive Inc.
Some, including Citigroup Inc. and E-Trade Financial Corp., have offered cash as an incentive to continue using online bill-pay. Wachovia has offered cash to encourage inactive bill-pay customers to try the service again, and it says bill-pay demand rose sharply when it eliminated fees.
But the MasterCard survey found that the best way to get people to pay bills online is to promise that the customer will not be liable for any losses related to unauthorized use of a bank's bill-pay service. Thirty-five percent of the survey group said they started paying bills online because of a zero-liability guarantee, versus 11% because of cash incentives.
"If they know that there was zero liability, that would change their attitudes and their behavior in paying bills online," Mr. Carey said. "These messages are sometimes buried."
Mr. Noyes said that at Wachovia, "we promote the online services guarantee as part of the overall process, and I think there's always an opportunity to make it more prevalent."
However, "we haven't heard this concern about bill presentment and the security of it," he said. "If we did, we'd take steps to further highlight it."
