Westpac is seeing increased uptake of online banking, with an average of 160,000 customers now logging on each day to make transactions and check balances, the bank says.
In the year to January, there were a total of 72 million log-ons by the bank’s customers, a 160 percent increase on the previous 12 months, according to a media release by the bank today.
Also in the past year, approximately 25,000 new term deposits were opened online, up 15 percent on the previous year.
In the statement, Westpac head of online banking Stu Woollett sings the praises of the bank’s Online Guardian security package, noting: “Westpac is so confident in the Online Guardian system it felt completely comfortable being the first bank to introduce an online banking guarantee to protect its customers in the unlikely event they succumb to online fraud.”
Woollett says phishing scams are the biggest threat to Westpac customers and that customers should be wary of any email purporting to be from the bank.
Westpac processed more that three million transactions in the month of January. Of those, seven were fraudulent and all were detected, Woollett says.