UK online banking figures don't add up

The UK trails most of its European cousins in the uptake of online banking.

According to the latest report from internet monitoring firm NetValue, the UK has four million online bankers. Germany, which is at the forefront of the online banking trend, has 5.4 million regular users of financial websites. In terms of time spent online, UK users came in ninth place, spending on average just 35 minutes a month. The French spend two hours online conducting their financial affairs. No one can match the Koreans, however, as almost half of its internet users visited a banking or other financial site in January. The destination for most UK users was online finance company Egg.com, which registered a 5.7 share of internet traffic. Barclays was the stickiest online website, with users connecting to the site for 34 minutes on average per month. But the outlook for the online banking industry as a whole looks rosy. A Datamonitor report released today estimates that there will be 66.2 million online bank accounts in Europe by 2003, compared to 26.2 million last year.