Exercise 18 a) Read the article about on-line banking

More and more people are choosing to do their personal banking on-line. But what can on-line banking offer that other types of banking can’t?

Firstly, by banking on-line you are not limited to a bank’s opening hours. You can check your bank account 24 hours a day, whenever it suits you. Transferring money from a savings account to a current account, opening an account or seeing how much interest you have earned, will take you just a few seconds. Compare that with the time you need to come to your local bank, queue up and carry out your transaction.

On-line banking offers you numerous other services, from buying shares, to making deposits, to ordering cheque books, to paying bills. For many people a particularly useful feature of this kind of banking is the fact that you have access to a large database, which contains details of all your accounts and the business you have done over the years.

All you need is an Internet connection to download the financial data onto your computer. You may not be able to pay cash on-line. So, on-line banking does offer many benefits.

At present banks especially those engaged in foreign trade and foreign exchange transactions find it useful to become part of the international electronic message switching network operated by SWIFT*. The acronym stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications which provides the network that enables financial institutions to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment

* міжнародна міжбанківська система передачі інформації та здійснення платежів (СВІФТ)

B) Write out from the text a list of the services on-line banking can provide for their clients and give your opinion about the advantages of on-line banking for foreign transactions.

Exercise 19 a) What goods or services do you buy over the Internet? What do you prefer not to buy? What problems have you had buying on the Internet? What kinds of products or services are best sold on the Net? Are there any things which could not or should not be sold on the Net? What are the risks of e-commerce for the companies involved and for their customers?