WordPress.com



Online Banking in BrazilBrazilian Rodrigo Abreu has not been inside a bank for several years, nor has he writen a paper check for any regular expense. For about a decade, Mr. Abreu, a thirtyish technology executive, has made every kind of scheduled payment through the Internet arm of his Brazilian bank, Banco Itau. He pays his car insurance, buys stocks, and conducts e-commerce transactions through the bank’s website. His mother, other family members, and all of his acquaintances also do most of their business transactions online. Advanced Internet technology may not be normally asociated with Brazil, where a vast majority of the population of 171.2 million has no online access. But when it comes to Internet banking, Brazil is the leader.Brazil’s economic problems in the early 1990s helped pressure major banks—Bradesco, Unibanco, and Banco Itau—to build advanced electronic payment systems that formed the backbone of the Internet services they offer today. At the time, the economy faced an almost daily inflationary rate of 3 percent. To combat the hyperinflation, banks built communications systems to clear checks and allow their customers to pay bills as soon as possible. That helped the customers avoid losing money during processing. “We were able to cash checks within 24 hours when the U.S. banks were still taking nearly a week,” said Milton Monteiro, who is vice president and is in charge of Internet banking at Banco Itau. “We had to be very efficient.”By 1993, each major Brazilian bank had built a complex private network so that when a customer’s paycheck came in it was cleared overnight and moved into an account that was hedged against inflation. Home banking was coming into vogue and people were already dialing directly into the banks’ networks to move money and pay bills instantly. In the United States, meanwhile, manual check processing and human bank tellers were still the norm.While many United States banks are catching up with the range of their online offerings, Bradesco, Banco Itau, and Unibanco still have a wider array of Internet services. Brazilians can complete nearly any type of financial transaction through the banks’ websites. Banks offer e-commerce portals, advanced business-to-business services, brokerage services, direct deposit, and bill-paying, all integrated into their websites. In fact, under a bill-paying standard now used in Brazil, bank customers can simply type in the bar code number of any bill; the bank immediately knows its amount and pays it upon request.Source: Lipschultz, David. The New York Times. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download