Royal Bank of Scotland enters electronic banking

The Royal Bank of Scotland joined the ranks of Midland and NatWest this week with the launch of a PC-based corporate electronic banking system.

Essentially a balance and transaction reporting facility, Royline for Windows will allow customers to check bank statements and balances and also make small volume payments that don?t require remittance information.

The system will replace the bank's existing MS-Dos software and will work as either a complement to or an alternative to the bank?s EDI Masterpay system.

One of the product's main attractions is that it incorporates Ibos, the international cash management service, which will allow instant branch-to branch cross-border banking. It also offers data import and export facilities to enable easy integration with other PC applications such as spreadsheets and databases. ?Royline for Windows will now nestle better with other applications, making it more attractive to our customers,? said Anne Dickie, product manager for electronic banking services at The Royal Bank of Scotland.

The bank currently have 5,500 customers on the MS-Dos version of its product and hope within the next three years to have extended the Windows customer base to about 12,000. Royline is just the first service the bank intends to provide on the Windows platform. Over the next couple of years it intends to create a range of different integrated products for PC banking, mixing and matching its current cash management services including EDI Masterpay, Roytrade, Roylink and Roybank.

Although enthusiastic about the possibilities of electronic commerce over the Internet the bank is taking a cautionary approach to developments in this arena. ?We are positioned to respond to requirements across our customer base,? said Terry Barham. ?We won?t be the pioneers of this technology but you?ll probably see an Internet based product from us within the next six months.?