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Perhaps I'm really showing my age here, but long before the introduction of ATMs and online banking, most banks were service-oriented and customer-focused, which was a great thing.

Okay, the most you could hope to get in terms of interest on your savings account was a measly 2% or so but on the other side of the ledger, lending rates were also half of what we pay today.

Then the banks discovered that they could not only make money by charging a small margin on borrowing but also by charging customers for every single action that was taken on their account. Withdrawals, payments, statements and almost every other conceivable type of interaction became a chargeable item and would eventually appear on your account under the heading "activity" or "transaction" fees.

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The problem was, so the banks told us, that wages were rising and all of this required the use of valuable human resource -- so the charges simply had to be passed on..

However, technology soon came to the rescue; or did it?

In an attempt to convince customers that it was a good idea to deal with a large steel box with flickering screen and array of buttons customers were told that these new ATMs would cut the cost of banking. By making interaction with your bank a far less personal thing, many of those transaction fees could be waived or significantly reduced.

Like the idiots we are, the general public swallowed this and, within a fairly short space of time, our account and cheque books were soon replaced by little plastic cards and we formed quite queues in front of these faceless, heartless tellers.

What's more, at least for a while, the fees did go down. It was cheaper to use an ATM than to do an "over the counter" transaction. In fact, this still remains the case today - but mainly because banks have further-hiked the latter rather than reducing the former.

And then, a couple of decades later, internet banking arrived.

Now, we were told, you can bank from the comfort and convenience of your home or office.

And what's more, you'll be saving money through the further depersonalisation of the banking process -- hmmm.

At the same time, most banks started shutting down smaller branches at a frantic rate. Many small towns and settlements were left entirely without any form of banking -- other than that monolithic steel ATM in the main street and the option of trying to check their balance over a crackly, unreliable rural line using a dial-up modem.

However, the fact is that a growing number of us now find internet banking to be very convenient for the day-to-day interaction required to pay bills, organise automatic payments and juggle our various accounts.

But, wouldn't you know it, across the ditch in Australia (where the head offices of virtually all our trading banks are located) there's now the start of what could become a trend towards charging for online banking services.

Yes, it would appear that over the ditch, the bankers have finally twigged to the fact that now we're hooked, they can start leaching even more of our money in the form of transaction or activity fees.

Since NZ generally follows Australia's lead in respect to banking, it's now only a matter of time before logging into your bank will cost you a small arm and a leg.

What I find most interesting of all is that the more the banks adopt new technologies, allegedly with the promise of reducing costs and improving service levels, the more we all have to pay.

I would wager that there are now fewer people employed by banks (per dollar transacted) than ever before and this technology has reduced the cost per transaction by an incredible amount -- yet we're all paying through the nose every time we even think about using our own money.

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