Internet Banking in Estonia

Short Description
Internet has become a symbol of new era in services industry and banking is inevitably one of the leaders in taking advantage of it. Internet is a technology that spreads faster than any other technology - the use of Internet is estimated to double in every hundred days. Estonia is considered to be a small and successful example of fast introduction of information and communication technologies1 in spite of the fact that little more than 10 years ago it was technologically relatively backward Soviet country.

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Content
Estonia is currently belonging to the country group of medium internet penetration on the global scale outnumbering its Baltic neighbors and Eastern-European countries but being somewhat behind from the Scandinavian countries, USA, Canada, leading European countries and some Asian countries.
The progress can be characterized from one hand by the rising number of Internet users as presented in Figure 1 and from the other hand by the wide possibilities of using Internet as presented later in the paper. Since the year 2000 the increase of usage rates has slowed down as the market is approaching to saturation and for the first two quarters of 2002 the number of Internet users has remained at the level of 39% (Emor 2002). The main further development in the Internet usage is growth of heavy user base (i.e. existing users will use Internet more intensively) rather than growth of the usage rates in general4. The research on the digital divide issues has pointed out that existing motivational, skill and access barriers prevent non-users from reaching the Internet (Digital Divide 2002) and unless specific measures are taken to overcome the barriers it is not realistic to expect considerable growth of Internet use.
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The term electronic banking is almost generic in its nature and therefore it is mostly used without any further explanation or definition. It should be reminded that electronic banking is not equal to the term Internet banking although the latter is undoubtedly the most widespread type of it. Electronic banking includes several traditional services like telephone banking, credit cards, debit cards, ATMs. The more recent additions are Internet banking, mobile banking and digital TV banking. Electronic banking is also known as electronic funds transfer (EFT) and basically is simply the use of electronic means to transfer funds directly from one account to another. This survey is mostly focusing on Internet banking and other methods have been included mainly for the purpose of comparison.
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