Financial institutions of all sizes are opening virtual branches that offer higher savings yields and lower interest rates in an effort to lure more customers.

Online banking is growing 27 percent yearly, which is faster than other retail banking channels, according to TowerGroups’s "Delivery Channel Volumes in the United States, 2006-2010: From ‘In Line’ to Online" report.

One of the biggest conferences in terms of Web Analytics, the Emetrics Summit, is quickly coming up at the end of March (this time in London). 

In a report titled “Online Banking 2006: Surfing to the Bank,” the Pew Research Center declared that the number of Internet users who bank online is on the rise. Unfortunately, their most recent in-house data appears to be from December of 2005.

Clients of some investment firms will soon have the opportunity to download podcasts of financial research for easy listening.

If Yahoo Japan’s most recent attempt at starting a joint venture and taking a position in an online bank succeeds, it could be a testing ground for establishing an online payment service.

Often when consumers buy online, vendors take a snapshot of the customer’s browsing data so they serve up contextual advertising based on user habits. A company called ROOT Markets thinks that information should be available to the customer as well.

The millions of dollars donated by individuals to relief efforts in Southeast Asia have brought criminals and scammers out of the woodwork, US government agencies and private anti-fraud groups warned last week, Internetworld.com reported.

Our “New Google Bomb” discussion in WebProWorld is one of our most popular to date, but the question remains, how does this phenomenon affect search optimization?

Customers of Denmark’s largest bank were left in the dark after of errors with IBM’s database software brought service down in mid March.