Though the internet banking gives a secure and swift access to your bank accounts, providing a nick of time speed through wireless or landline connections and convenience by accessing the accounts from anywhere around the globe, but it has its own pitfalls. The foremost concern is the privacy and safety of a bank account, which can be termed as a gamble for the end-user. Consumers are reluctant to use net-banking services due to a lot of stories about the computer viruses, the exploits of hackers, sniffers, guessing passwords and random dialing etc. This gives an impression that whenever you look around people's personal or financial information, their funds or identity has been filched, and their financial repute is busted.

In early days of online banking, the very common complaint was hacking of online bank accounts, which raised the consumer fear about security. Although banks have dealt with this issue quite successfully and expert legalization is provided by the online banking services, fear of loss still haunts immensely on the consumers' minds. Hence, people still prefer to go to the banks in person in order to avoid any hitches and clichés regarding their transactions.

Furthermore, for the beginners, online banking can be difficult to understand and execute as for that matter one should be well versed with computers and the internet. Photo identification and other identifications are being asked by some banks which is really very inconvenient for the customer. Another concern which is very much there due to which people are reluctant to go for online banking is that if some one wants to switch over his bank, the process seems to be cumbersome real-time than in person. This technology fear has resulted in a minimal growth in the usage of online banking when it is compared to the overall growth in the internet usage across the Britain.

Moreover, the transaction risk is another challenge. Due to the heavy load on the bank's website for the execution of transactions, sometimes the system trips, resulting in a loss of information about the executed transactions, leave the customers in despair. Sometimes the websites go down due to heavy traffic and customers are unable to access their accounts when needed. During 2007, a case in this regard was reported when a lot of Northern Rock's customers indicted the bank of putting restriction on its website to access it in order to slow down the withdrawal of the billions of pounds from the bank.

Customers who do their businesses through the Internet have little forbearance for errors or omissions from banks that do not have highly DEVELOPED internal control systems to deal with their Internet banking business. So it has remained a cause of concerns for the online customers as to how to cope up with this regular feature. Here it brings the key challenge for the internet banking services to provide quickest response to the queries of their online customers regarding their accounts and transaction status. Prompt replies by the customer service departments of the various banks across UK are not been up to the mark in the recent times. However, some banks provide excellent customer service in this regard; they are fully connected through the handy SMS interface to their respective customers who can access their accounts through their mobile phones. For instance, HSBC has an award winning 24-hours customer service which it is providing to its all UK customers.  

Bank charges are another point of concern for the users of online banking facility. Most of the banking services not only go for high bank charges on the online transactions, some extra and hidden charges are also levied on the customers, which instead of providing a facility to the customers, put a burden on them. For that matter it is important to first check out the online banking fees before opening online account with a bank otherwise if the consumer is not completely aware of the full costs of the services he is going to avail, he will remain in a fix. To stop the overcharging by bank, the UK government had also penalized several banks in the recent past; others have been asked to reduce their bank charges in order to facilitate the people.

It is really important to address all the issues related to cyber banking especially the security risks that should be met intently with no errors and omissions while the execution of a transaction. With more precise and flawless and simple online banking solutions, more and more people can switch to this convenient mode of investment and banking in future.