The Use of Internet Banking Among Portuguese College Students

Internet Banking has emerged as one of the most remarkable and profitable ecommerce applications over the last decade. The home banking is a service that allows new ways of interaction with customers, turning possible to overcome the barriers of distance between bank institutions and their clients. Despite the increasing importance of home banking, very few studies were made in the Portuguese context and, therefore, very little are known about the profile of users of this service particularly in some specific domains. This paper has the objective to show the results of our study considering the use of Internet Banking among Portuguese college students contextualized with other existing studies/publications and performing a critical analysis from the obtained results. We realized that the large majority of students use Internet Banking, consider the service safe, adopt it essentially for money movements and have a strong perception that bank institutions adopts anti-frauds mechanisms. Additionally, our study demonstrated that there is a strong association between the simultaneously use of home banking and MBNet services, and we realized that the user perception about the safety of Internet Banking increases with the use of these services.