Home Finance in an Electronic Age

For some 200 customers of New York's Chemical Bank, the tedious chore of checking their balances or paying their bills no longer means standing in line at the neighborhood branch office. Instead, they simply switch on their Atari home computers, telephone a special Chemical Bank number, punch in some secret password codes and numbers into their machines and conduct all their banking business from their living rooms.

Chemical's foray into bank-at-home personal computing, dubbed Pronto, was announced last week. This was the latest move by a growing number of banks to cash in on the popularity of personal computers. As prices for the machines have plunged and their use has spread, bankers have begun eyeing home computers as a huge new market and a way to cut costs and paperwork in the back office. New York's Citibank has an experimental program in 100 homes in Queens, while the First Bank System in Minneapolis has computers with 250 customers.

For now, Chemical's customers can use only Atari machines, but by year's end bank officials hope to offer Pronto to people who own other brands. Cost of the service: $5 to $10 a month.

The United American Bank in Knoxville, Tenn., has been offering bank-at-home since January 1981, and the United American Bank in Memphis has had the service since the start of this year. For $5 a month, customers can pay bills, inquire about interest rates or even receive a computerized news-delivery system provided by CompuServe, a Columbus information data bank. So far, about 550 customers have signed up at the two banks.

One question that continues to worry bankers and customers about at-home accounts is security. Computerized crime is already a menace to banks, and the dangers are multiplied many times over when access to bank computers is opened up to customers as well as employees. As a protective measure, Chemical's Pronto customers must send three separate codes every time they want to conduct business. First Bank System in Minneapolis is testing a magnetic identification card that must be inserted into a special terminal slot before the customer can sign on to the system. Both Chemical and First Bank System claim that they have had no security problems with their pilot projects.

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