BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Although a lot of research works has been done on the prospects and challenges of Information Technology in the banking industry, theses research works are broad based and only few are actually carried on Electronic Banking (E-banking). Modern banks now realise that only those that overhaul their payment service delivery and operations are likely to survive and prosper in the 21st century (Opara et al, 2010). This is due to pressure of globalisation, consolidation, privatisation, deregulation and rapidly changing technology (Connel and Saleh 2004). In order to properly place themselves in favourable positions for competitions and be one of those corporations to be reckoned with in the new century, banks are making use of Internet to execute mobile banking, this developed from bringing PCs together to form local and Wide Area Networks through client/server technology. Many banks have installed modern computer inter-connectivity backbone that would enable them achieve communications of data and multimedia over Internets, Intranets and Extranets. They also realize that they have to achieve not only management/staff wide computer literacy but what could be called information literacy i.e. knowing how to locate, analyse, store and use information.
All staff and managers in a modern bank need to be able to search and gather data from several types of sources, analyse them, select relevant ones and organise them in such a manner to allow them make decisions based on the organised data. Banks of the future realises that the banking of tomorrow requires more of electronic manipulations and shuffling of bits-based money and other banking transactions, instead of paper. In other words, paper based transactions are now being replaced by electronic-based transactions e.g. the Internet. Whether a bank would be successful or not depend on the extent to which it is investing in IT and using it in an innovative manner. This area has been tip to be a major competitive ground for banks that are operating in the post-consolidation era. What are the major issues needed to be mastered by Nigeria banks in order to compete with the rest of the world? What are the major developments and challenges in the Nigerian operating environment that are aecting the growth of electronic banking in the industry? These are some of the questions that would be addressed in the course of this study.
