Some new numbers are out on online and telephone banking.

A couple of surprising things:

First, a third of people who bank online also use automated telephone banking. Many had predicted online banking would be the death of phone banking. Perhaps not.

Second, and more importantly, because of that prediction, many of the security precautions put in place for online banking have not been done for the phone systems. You can see some examples in the above linked article.

If you bank by phone, check to see if your bank's system takes those precautions. We often get the question from consumers, "is online banking safe?" While every system has risks, the short answer is yes, and it's probably safer than the old-fashioned way.

Online banking has a lot of advantages. The more paper you can remove from your life, the better for ID theft prevention. So if you're checking your account status online, you don't need paper monthly statements anymore. Also, your bank is probably going to eat any unauthorized withdrawals from your account. So they have an incentive to keep their system secure. And finally, with online bill pay, the bank usually pays faster, pays electronically (thus less paper), takes responsibility for ensuring your bills are paid and keeps proof of payment. That's far better than most of us can do for ourselves.