Success criteria for financial institutions in electronic commerce

Since the World Wide Web became a medium for commercial activities in 1993, a tremendous number of companies joined in. Companies want to reach new markets through this low cost and massive computer network. The financial services industry is one of the early players. Since the nature of this delivery channel is very different from the traditional ones, banks are faced with competition from traditional foes as well as from non-traditional competitors. Through the use of web crawlers, this study has identified the key players in Electronic Commerce and has identified 5 success criteria for banks to compete in this new market: a complete e-Commerce strategy; innovation; high risk tolerance; an efficient communication network and significant asset size.