... 5. Finally, and most important, it must be secure! The innovations in computing and telcommunications have improved all the functions in retail banking. Computers have empowered the production and telecommunications have created new distribution channels that have instantaneous and global reach. Of these new channels, Internet is the least costly and with widest reach. However, each channel has its own virtues and for the best benefit of a retail bank, they should co-exist with a highly computerized strong back-end and a middleware to glue them all together. 3 Retail Banking Using the functional perspective, a retail bank (or the business of "retail banking") is a particular combination of functions performing the transfer of purchasing power across time and distance. Consider a simple example: the savings account. This financial product transfers purchasing power from the present to the future. But this savings function can be accomplished in other ways; for example, by investing ...

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