News 

A survey commissioned by tech companies including Microsoft and BT has found that British banks are to plough £600m over the next year into computer systems at call centres and branches, with a spartan £69.8m allocated for Internet arms, despite recent (relative) success stories such as Egg announcing it was near to breaking even.

The concentration on branches and call centres is to allow the banks to overhaul their current systems, make them interoperable and offer better and more customer services facilities and improved access to customer data.

Ian Parkes, of Coleman Parkes Research, the company commissioned to carry out the research, told the BBC that banks and financial institutions 'need to understand the complexity and fickleness of their customers and they want to know what they want on a daily basis... The financial sector is unique because other sectors can get away with a much lower level of understanding of their customers.'