Banking on the screen, dispensing with the phone

In the 1980s and 1990s the development of the call centre industry and the spread of the cash machine liberated us bank customers from the tyranny of the lunch hour bank queue. Instead of turning up politely to stand in line for a teller so we could deposit or cash our cheques, we found ourselves queueing outside for access to the hole in the wall - our employers electronically wired our salaries to the bank's back-office and we electronically extracted them again from the front.

It was at that point that we realised we could dispense with the bank's august portals completely and we all signed up for telephone banking. So now, instead of queueing very occasionally to get a statement or change a direct debit, we could make our banking arrangements from the comfort of our own phones and in the comfort of our own homes.

But, and such is human nature, even this complete liberation from the bank's bureaucratic requirements is no longer enough, according to futurologists, the Future Foundation.

Now we're finding it irksome to have to deal with the call centre and all its tedious requests for passwords and mothers' maiden names. We would rather go on line and get to grips with the account ourselves.

According to research undertaken by the Future Foundation in conjunction with mobile bankers, Monitise, 20 per cent of all bank customers would prefer to log-on than dial-in, a preference that has accelerated rapidly over the last 8 years. In 2002 just 5 per cent of bank customers wanted to go online to do their banking.

The report authors suggest that those numbers have changed as the 18 to 25 age-group, now taking up bank accounts in a big way, are more familiar with using the technology. Their proportion, however, was 25 per cent as opposed to the average 20 per cent, so not hugely different.

The big change has, of course, been the improvements made in broadband access since 2002, when most of us were still on dial-up and knew that logging into a bank would be very tedious indeed. Now it's a no-brainer. The survey polled 1,000 adults in the UK for their views on the role of technology in customer service.