Banks profiting from service charges

Ha - you thought I talk about Maybank, right?

Nope, Maybank in Malaysia, for a while at least, retreats from its charges that the bank wanted to impose on its customers for the usage of Maybank's Internet Banking website - I wrote something about it before.

Let me try this again whole thought again:

The process is as follows: You log in from your computer (if you are at home), that you have paid (hopefully). You have also paid your monthly subscription fee to your chosen Internet Service Provider (as long as you don't log in from your company, you should have paid something to an ISP).

You maintain an account with Maybank, and the bank planned to charge you that you can access your account via their website.

Okay, in the meantime, they retreated from this idea - Bank Negara, the National Bank of Malaysia, plus, hopefully, a lot of pressure from the consumers, forced them to get back to the table and think through their idea again. What is good, I think

Now, everybody, who works for Maybank, please stop reading here.

It actually appears that Maybank or Malaysia is not the only country where banks profit from the growing trend to log on and use their service.

It is also happening in Korea. There, banks also have quite a profitable year - banks in Korea are expected to post record-high incomes from banking fees this year. No protest in Korea. But one guy Kim Woo-jin who is a researcher at the Korea Institute of Finance, said that even though a raise in fees was inevitable to keep banks in profit, it represented a disservice to customers. The banks should prepare an alternative plan to minimize customers' loss."

I am happy to live in Malaysia - I don't have an Internet account where the fees could get increased, but once banks become comfortable in increasing fees, they will find all kind of ways to increase fees for services that you haven't thought about.

I am coming from Germany, and let me tell you, there are lots of ways for different institutions to increase some service fee, and some service fee there. And the tendency to increase fees accelerated with each year the country headed towards crisis and higher unemployment. Wonder, if there are some clouds in Malaysia's economic heaven that I haven't seen yet?