On the desktop PC side, CompuServe recently announced that it's got into bed with the TSB. In May of this year, the two organizations unveiled their home banking system, which operates 24 hours a day. To gain instant access, you have to be an existing TSB customer. But as only 2 per cent of TSB's customers actually have CompuServe accounts, the overall strategy would seem to be to convert the existing CIS userbase over to the TSB. Currently and perhaps surprisingly it takes up to one calendar month to open a new TSB cheque account and sign on with PC Banking.

    PC Banking isn't on CompuServe itself, but on a web site that's only accessible via CompuServe. You therefore have to have WinCIM's winsock set up before you can access it. When you dial in and 'GO TSB', you have to key in both a unique PIN number and a password. To help maintain security, this password is changed periodically, and the user can change it himself at any time. Thereafter, you have the normal range of bank services. Customers can, for example, pay bills, transfer money between accounts, and buy discounted goods using the TSB Trustcard. But the main virtue of the system is that it operates in real time. In other words, when you call up a balance, it's the current day's, up to the second balance, not the previous day's, as with all other banks. You can therefore deposit money into an account, and then immediately draw on it. There's also a facility to e-mail the bank. Whether the bank will then charge you for responding, as often happens with High Street banks, isn't discussed.

    CompuServe is currently looking to extend the service by going into alliance with other High Street banks. So in the near future, we're likely to see several of these ventures. Barclays, for one, has just begun trials of its own home banking service, in collaboration with Visa International. In March of this year it randomly selected 2,500 of its UK customers to test the system. If this and others succeed, within ten years, banks as we know and love (?) them could well disappear from town centres, and simply become sites on the Net instead.