Net banking: consumers and business owners swarm to the Internet to do their banking. It's easier than a trip to the bank, and it saves loads of time.

• Author: Campbell, Melissa

As the controller for Carlile Transportation Systems, Judy Eckart spends the first 15 minutes of her day pouring over her company's bank statements: checking balances, seeing what checks have cleared the bank, which new deposits have come in.

Sound like a chore? It's not. This daily routine saves Eckart and an assistant countless hours when it's time to close the books at the end of the month--no more scrounging up old receipts or long-lost paperwork. And, she said, her company saves about $1,500 a month in what used to go toward banking fees.

And she's finished before most bank tellers have traded their bunny slippers for business shoes. Eckart does all her banking in her office, simply by turning on her computer and logging on to KeyBank's Web site.

Carlile has joined the growing millions of businesses and consumers who choose to let cars rest while they take a trip to the bank through the Internet. Online business banking has soared in popularity in a relatively short time. According to statistics provided by S-1 Corp., which provides software and similar services to financial institutions, of roughly 11.5 million active business bank accounts in the U.S., about 33 percent do at least part of their banking online, up from 12 percent in 1998. And, experts believe, that number will continue to climb as people become more familiar and more comfortable with the Internet and its security features.

"Internet banking is not a choice for banks anymore," said Barbara Brock, who's in charge of Alaska First Bank and Trust's Web page. "At first banks thought this was a passing fancy, but people want this."

The ability to use a computer for banking has been around since the mid-1980s. But it was a tedious, slow process, said Paul Ayres, senior vice president and manager of KeyBank's online services. It wasn't until the Internet became widely available did the average consumer begin to toy with the idea of doing business online.

A full two-thirds of today's households have a computer, as do most businesses across the nation. Lives are busier now and people have grown to expect any service to be fast, reliable, safe and convenient, Ayres said.

"We put an awful lot into trying to mask the complicated things on our Web page so it would be transparent to the customer," he said. "People have special expectations for what they want from banking online and they don't explore much to find other things. It's not like how they surf around on the Net."

But while...