At present, the availability of e-banking is substantially greater in developed countries than in developing economies. Many developing countries do not have the necessary telecommunications, banking, commercial, bureaucratic and legal infrastructures to support the widespread introduction of e-banking (Simpson, 2002). Access to the Internet is a major problem in the developing world, and presents an obstacle to the growth of e-banking.
It is difficult to predict the usage of e-banking on an hourly or daily basis. These ‘scalability problems’ can give rise to a slowing down of the website, or even a website crash (temporary unavailability). This can cause many reputation problems and financial damage. This was the case at Northern Rock Bank in UK. This bank ran into credit problem when news spread that this bank was in trouble, thousands of people rushed to the bank website to transfer their money elsewhere which resulted in numerous technical problems in their e-banking system for many days. Some of the ways of addressing this problem according to Sergeant (2000) are:
Undertake market research to predict demand,
Adopt systems with adequate capacity and scalability,
Undertake proportionate advertising campaigns, and
Ensure adequate staff coverage and develop a suitable business continuity plan which not only helps coping with scalability problems but with other causes of systems failure.
A number of other technical solutions are also available to address this problem but owing to the high cost associated with them, some banks do not implement them.