Some people just cannot do without online banking.
That was one of the findings in a study that asked volunteers to forgo the Web for two weeks. When told they could log on to the Web if they absolutely needed to, half the participants said they could not get through the full period without banking online.
The study was conducted in June by Yahoo Inc., which paid 13 households $950 each to disconnect themselves from the Web for 14 days. They were permitted the emergency Internet visits (called lifelines) on the condition they keep a log documenting the circumstances.
"Seventy percent of the lifelines that were used were for financial services purposes," said Richard Kosinski the category development officer for business and finance at Yahoo, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Some could not even go 48 hours without e-banking; the first financial lifeline, a loan application, was documented just two days into the study. Over all, nine households had to use their lifelines.
Megan Crutchfield, a clinical research assistant in Portland, Ore., said that except for online banking, "There wasn't any other reason that I felt like I needed to use a lifeline."
Ms. Crutchfield, 26, said she was a victim of identity theft in 2001 and has since made it a habit to check her bank balances daily. Last year she started banking with Washington Mutual Inc., and began using its online banking service.
During the study Ms. Crutchfield used the phone instead.
"I was actually calling every morning, which is how I was getting my balance, but it doesn't" give enough information. "They offer you the amount of the transaction, but they don't give you any additional details." And using the phone was much slower, she said.
Ms. Crutchfield's experience was typical, Mr. Kosinski said. Many participants said they would rather skip banking altogether "than go back to the old way of doing things," he said.
For example, one of them used their lifeline to submit a student loan application electronically to avoiding paying to mail the form overnight.
Other households used lifelines to pay bills, though Mr. Kosinski said at least one set up bill payments before the study began and scheduled them to be paid during the two-week period.
Sanjay Gupta, the e-commerce executive at Bank of America Corp., said B of A customers prefer online banking for the same reasons Ms. Crutchfield found she could not go without it - information is faster and easier to find. "I'm not surprised" by the results, he said.
Doug Marshall, the senior vice president of product management and deposit strategy at Washington Mutual, said many Wamu customers consider the Web their primary banking channel.
Penny Gillespie, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., said that customers who have become accustomed to online banking may no longer have patience for other channels.
That is not to say traditional channels, though they may be slower or otherwise flawed, are useless, Ms. Gillespie said. People who have never banked online are probably happy using branches, call centers, and ATMs, she said. "You don't know what you're missing if you haven't tried it."
