This means that banks may enlarge their market without opening new branches. The cost of the average payment transaction on the Internet is minimum. As a result, the use of the Internet for commercial transactions started to gain momentum in 1995. Since then, millions of commercial web sites have emerged. 3,286 banks around the world have already established their web sites.
Some banks are there because their competitors have been.
Surprisingly, a good number of Saudi banks have designed web sites and a very few are offering online banking. The Web is a vehicle for the most common transactions that one could expect to have with a bank. Websites are the digitized form of brochure that provides institutional and promotional information, financial reports, vacancies and recruitment forms, search engine, ways to contact the bank etc. As at the middle of 2000, there are 11 banks with 1201 branches operating across Saudi Arabia. These web sites are designed in Arabic and English for clients' added convenience.