6 banking transactions that are just easier online

By Mike Aquino for Yahoo! Southeast Asia

In a previous article about online banking, we showed how doing more of your banking transactions online can do you good (even though your bank teller might miss you). Its benefits are immediately apparent: speed, simplicity, increased security, and anytime use.

Online equivalents of transactions like funds transfers, bills payment, and currency exchange use less steps and take less time, often allowing you to complete the transaction in less than a dozen mouse-clicks without leaving your desk. Goodbye, spending unproductive time stuck in line at the bank or bill payment centers. Hello, more free time to get out more.

Here, we’ve lined up six of the most common transactions you can do while banking online, and how the online experience compares to the alternative.

1. Converting Dollars to Pesos

Then: Converting dollars to pesos used to require the intervention of a money changer. And not every money changer is within walking distance of your bank—the downtime between withdrawing dollars and having them changed exposes you to the risk of theft, and sometimes the most conveniently-located money changer isn’t exactly the most honest one.

Now: If you have a dollar account and a peso account enrolled in the same online profile, you can just transfer dollars to your peso account and dispense with the risky downtime between the bank teller and the money-changer.

The difference: You do in minutes what used to take you an hour or more to finish. And you get less surprises along the way: in your correspondent’s experience, the online conversion rate consistently hits PHP 0.20 less than Yahoo! Finance's dollar-to-peso conversion—competitive to any mall money changer. The downside is that such conversions can only be done during the Philippine Dealing System’s trading hours between 9:30 am and 3:30 pm on weekdays.

2. Checking Your Balance

Then: Being told “I’ve put the money in your account” doesn’t mean anything until you’ve verified it. And verifying that bit of information used to require visiting an ATM (outside, risky) or calling the bank hotline (inside, but long wait on hold).

Now: Checking your balance is the first thing you do when you log onto your online profile. Most online banking portals will also allow you to view past transactions as far back as 60 days in the past.

The difference: You can verify your balance at any time, from anywhere, and in an instant. And you can check as often as you like, so you can satisfy your inner obsessive-compulsive without annoying the hotline operator.

3. Sending Money

Then: You have multiple obligations: rent to the landlord, your cut of the household budget to the spouse, allowance for your high-schooler. Visiting the bank periodically to deposit to each of their accounts can be a chore. And that’s not counting the emergencies: what happens when the spouse needs cash now and you’re nowhere near an ATM (or your spouse for that matter)?

Now: You can enroll third-party accounts in your online profile, and once these have been confirmed by your bank, you can deposit funds into those accounts as often as you like, even outside of banking hours.

The difference: You’re no longer bound by banking hours to make deposits into trusted accounts. Interbank transactions remain an issue, though: as of press time, only Bancnet Online permits money transfers across different banks.

4. Online Shopping

Then: Shopping in the physical world can be fun and all, but it can be pretty exhausting, particularly if the brick-and-mortar shops you visit are all out of the items you want.

Now: You can find that hard-to-find gadget in any number of online stores, then use your online baking profile to pay for your purchase through a third-party transfer to a shopping portal like DragonPay.

The difference: You’ll never need to compete with the crowds in the mall again, and you might enjoy some online-only discounts to boot. Two caveats: first, online shopping is tailor-made for buying bags, books and gadgets, and not so much shoes or clothes; and second, not all online shops deliver to the Philippines for now.

5. Paying Your Bills

Then: Paying bills is never fun, and the payment centers certainly don’t make the experience any more enjoyable. And even if you manage to consolidate all your payments into a single visit to one payment center a month, nobody likes the idea of carrying that much cash out in the open.

Now: Once you’ve signed up your different bills into your online profile, you can make subsequent payments in one-click increments, at any time.

The difference: For many online banking users, this is the killer app: the ability to pay as soon as you get the bill, without ever having to wait in line at the payment center. No time wasted, no lines, and no worries about muggers or snatchers.

6. Reloading Phones

Then: Prepaid phones are fun until reloading time: then it’s either scratchcards or your suking tindahan—not difficult, but somewhat complicated (“No, Manang, 4596, not 4556”). 

Now: After you’ve registered your cellphone number in your online profile, reloading your phone just takes a few taps on your keyboard.

The difference: In terms of speed and ease of use, online phone reloading beats any alternative method on any given day.