Offshore Banking - Some Advice

Despite being aware of online banking, you may still be paying your bills through mail and making deposits personally in your local bank. While you may have shopped online for a loan or a home mortgage, you may still prefer to do business with the bank that you trust, on a face-to-face basis.

Online banking offers the convenience of dealing with your own bank, while staying at home. Instead of writing checks and posting them, you can avail of automated bill paying and enjoy more leisure.

For many years now, banks have offered automated transactions and services to their clients. Our checking accounts are now on monthly statements instead of cancelled checks, offering the facility of a record of all transactions without the bother and expense of accounting for all cancelled checks and manually accounting for them. Banks have further simplified our lives by offering us an alternative to paper and postage.

A new popular alternative for those with surplus cash looking for tax shelters is online offshore banking. While secure Internet shopping sites offer safe transactions through a single password, such is not the case with online offshore banking transactions. Online offshore banking transactions go a step further, by encrypting all communications including your passwords. This makes it literally fool proof making it impossible for any third party to tamper with the information.

Hackers however can overcome encryption too and access home PCs to get at your password. Users have to take precautions not to share their passwords with others or leave it lying around to prevent the possibility of unscrupulous hands accessing them. Most online offshore banks offer further protection in the form of transaction numbers, (TANs) which are used only once. Another method is to use two passwords, which are entered in a random pattern for each transaction. European countries also offer their customers unique tokens of a two-factor authentication method. Some offer digital certificates for authentication. Many European banks extend online banking to pay merchants directly from your account.

Fearing fraud, many customers avoid online offshore banking. No security measures are completely safe but the instances of fraud on online offshore banking have been negligible. This may well be due to the low number of Internet bankers. The fact of the matter however, is that the number of cases of fraud in conventional banking is much larger.

A person opting for online banking has to be careful with his passwords or information about his accounts. More so when dealing with banks on the Internet. The most common form of Internet fraud is phishing where and Internet banker is persuaded to part with a password to an unethical party.

While caution is indeed very important, online banking is far more convenient than regular banking as we have known it.