This will over-ride seasonal discounts
This will over-ride seasonal discounts.For wary investors, Cofunds fund supermarket allows them to set up a cash reserve account, and decide which funds to invest in later; Fidelity can phase money into the market over the next six months.Jason Hollands, of the IFA BestInvest, says this could be a good choice for any bearish investors. “If you are in a mad rush, go for the cash option now, and make your investment decision a more informed choice over the next few weeks or months,” he says.. Internet banking is coming of age. Gone are the days of security lapses and other glitches, from customer details being available to other users of the site, failure to launch on time, to suspension of the service on the first day of operation. Although it would be reckless to claim there will never be any more such problems, they are clearly fading
Moneynet Internet banking is coming of age.
The latest best estimate of Tim Sawyer, marketing director of cahoot, is that some 10 million internet accounts have been set up and 4.5 million customers regularly use computers for their daily banking chores.Although there had been pilot schemes, notably by Bank of Scotland in this country, the first truly online bank was Wells Fargo’s website in the US in 1994. It took three more years for UK banks to join in when Nationwide building society and Royal Bank of Scotland unveiled their operations. In May 1995, Wells Fargo claims it was the first to offer banking on the Web when it offered the ability to view balances and the past 45 days’ transactions.Today, all the major high street bank and building societies have internet sites. Some even have offshoots with trendy names, such as Halifax’s IF (Intelligent Finance), Abbey National’s cahoot and Co-op Bank’s Smile, seen as attempts to corner younger markets.It is not difficult to understand why they have rushed into internet banking. Apart from keeping up with the competition and the need to offer the most modern means of dealing with customers, the main attraction is lower costs.Using the existing high-street branch network costs anything from £5 to £10 a transaction, depending on the bank’s efficiency. Even the phone/post only banks, generally operated through call centres, cost about £2 every time a customer uses them.
Internet banking, which involves hardly any human beings at the other end of the modem, slashes costs to less than 2p a time.This is why some, especially the internet-only banks such as IF, smile and cahoot, can offer attractive rates of interest on ordinary accounts. Compare their rates with the miserly 0.1 per cent on the high street All are easy to use Just type in the name, usually followed by .co.uk or. Once into a site, you will see that a major advantage for customers using internet banks, apart from their more attractive rates of interest paid in many cases, is the convenience. Most are open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, excepting Lloyds TSB which closes between midnight and 4am.Different services are available from the online banks, so do your homework first.
Useful places to start include moneyextra.co.uk or find.co.uk. At one extreme is Virgin, which combines mortgage, credit card, deposit and ordinary accounts into one package, good for the financially astute. Then come banks such as IF and Woolwich that allow offset accounts so money on deposit in one account can offset interest payable in another, such as a mortgage, reducing payments.Some offer minimal service. Egg, one of the best-known names on the internet, is not really a bank.
