E-finance services and a research on applicability of account aggregation service in Turkey

Thanks to economic integration among countries, developments in data transmission systems, wireless communication technologies and developments in internet, the quality and structure of financial services have changed rapidly and this change is still going on. Especially the emergence of such new financial systems as e-banking and e-mediation services has reshaped the financial market structure of in the world. E-finance is defined as financial operations that individuals and institutions out of finance carry out through internet or other similar communication networks. The extent of e-finance has expanded enormously in our country. According to March 2007 reports of association of banks in Turkey, there are 18.238.201 registered internet banking accounts in Turkey. Comparing this number with the population, the importance of the development can be emphasized more clearly. Based on such factors as cost, time and accessibility, e-finance concepts have been developed in the countries that have been able to make use of information technologies at higher levels. One of the consequences of this has emerged as account aggregators which are institutions that can make the online account information received from different finance institutions visible. They enable their users to see their accounts in different institutions on a single screen and to make transactions among them without entering them separately. This study researched the usage of such aggregators in Turkey and looked into what kind of benefits they can provide for users and institutions and what kind of problems they might cause for banks and intermediary institutions. In the application section of the study, a questionnaire was conducted on banks and intermediary institutions. The data were assessed through independent sample t-test analysis. According to the results, it was concluded that there is a sufficient infrastructure of aggregator services in Turkey; that these services will yield customer and institution based benefits and that there will be some problems in the process.