Talk of a time when trips to the bank will be obsolete is nothing new – computerized banking has been around for a decade now. But even though it’s attracted few fans among consumers, experts are still touting its promise. The reason: nearly everyone has a bank account and is thus a potential user, “Everybody’s looking for the ‘killer app’ . . . ,” says consultant Richard Crone of KPMG Peat Marwick. “Home banking may be one of them.” More than 7 million people already own finance programs like Intuit’sQuicken, which balances checkbooks, tracks investments and spits out spiffy graphs. But using these programs off-line can be a pain, requiring hours of re-entering checks into the computer. By going online with their bank, people can eliminate some of the bookkeeping and automate bill-paying.
But few users are getting connected. Fewer than 350,000 computer users bank at home, analysts say. “It’s nowhere, and it’s going to be nowhere for a few years,” says Mark Macgillivray of H&M Consulting. At US Bank in Portland, Ore., only 4,500 of the bank’s 800,000 customers make use d the bank’s online program. Both banks and software companies are betting this will change as the 70 percent of Americans who don’t own computers start buying. By 1998, analysts estimate, home bankers will number 7.5 million. That’s when the cash should flow to software makers, who hope to move from providing one-time transactions (Billy pays $99 for a copy of Word 6.0) to a business of collecting fees (Billy pays $9 a month and 25 cents per check to be hooked into his bank).
For now the folks at Microsoft and Intuit are busy writing checks to their Fed-fighting lawyers. In the meantime, they’d rather talk of their venture’s bright future than the current court battle. Intuit’s Scott Cook promises the new technology will “make it easy to . . . make the best financial decisions.” But those sentiments probably won’t cheer Cook when he checks his own Quicken screen: he lost more than $40 million last week when Intuit’s stock tanked in the wake of the Justice Department’s action.
