The number of people in the UK who have used the Internet to seek straightforward financial services information such as share prices, ISAs, pensions and mortgages, has increased by 80% over the past year.
However, people are not yet ready to give up their bank account with a high street bank or building society. The growth in the number of people that have abandoned the high street to bank online is slowing.
Those are the key findings of research published by BT Finance Industry Solutions and The Henley Centre.
The research found that more than one third of the UK population gained financial information over the web in 2001, while the number of people who bought financial products online trebled to 15%.
However, the number of people actively banking online was found to have levelled off sharply over the past few months, with a drop of 100,000 users between May and August 2001. This put the total number of online bankers in the UK at 5.6 million or 11.5% of the population.
BT Finance Industry Solutions general manager Ben Burgess said: "These figures show that the internet is beginning to show the promise that financial providers have invested heavily in, but not in ways they have predicted.
"The reason for this plateauing out of online banking is that we have reached the big gap between the early adopters - who embraced the technology several years ago - and the rest of the population, who haven't yet started to use it.
"It is the great challenge now for the financial services industry to leap that chasm and make electronic channels appeal to the majority of the population."
The research follows news earlier this month that Zurich Financial Services had launched an internet bank called zurichbank.co.uk.
At the time, ZFS said it aimed to attract more than 300,000 customers in the next five years.
ZFS said that apart from products such as current accounts, the bank also planned to offer mortgages and would cross-sell ZFS insurance products to customers.
