Currently, federal regulators are overseeing fewer than a dozen online banks that appeared in the past four years. Add to those an additional three approved by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and one supervised by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Security and privacy are two of federal regulators' primary concerns. Regulators are also interested in how assets are invested, the volatility of deposits, and whether banks are planning to sell their charters. It costs a bank about a penny to execute a transaction online, compared to a dollar for a manual transaction at a branch bank.
Most estimates say that six million customers now use Internet banking.
That number is expected to grow to 24 million by 2002.