The Tor anonymity network depends on volunteers to operate relays, and might offer higher bandwidth with lower response latencies if more users could be incentivized to contribute relay bandwidth. We introduce TEARS, a system rewarding useful service with traffic priority. TEARS audits relays and rewards them with anonymous coins called Shallots, proportionally to bandwidth contributed. Shallot...

This paper will present the reasons for success of e-banking (including actual results) in Croatia both among the individuals and companies. The main reason is that up to early 2002 all companies' payments were done through a centralized system. Only then banks started to do payment services for companies which were faced with a rather easy choice – continue using paper payment orders and recei...

Traditional authentication systems used to protect access to online services (such as passwords) are vulnerable to compromise via the introduction of a keystroke logger to the service user’s computer. This has become a particular problem now that many malicious programs have keystroke logging capabilities. When banks first introduced online banking services they realised this, and added feature...

Internet banking has become widely available in Jamaica and yet there have been few studies to understand the characteristics of its users. For banks to improve their service and similar services it becomes imperative that they can justify the costs associated with these services. One of the ways these costs can be justified is if their customer base of internet banking users was to increase, t...

The three main measures of competition (HHI, Lerner Index, and H-Statistic) are uncorrelated for U.S. banks. We investigate why this occurs, propose a frontier measure of competition, and apply it to five major bank service lines using data only available since 2008. Fee-based banking services comprise 35% of bank revenues so assessing competition by service line is preferred to using a single ...

The study provides insights into experiential marketing in a predominantly goal-directed service like internet banking. A model is proposed that combines two complementary approaches in the analysis of experience: a cognitive approach based on quality and an affective approach based on emotions. 754 valid observations have been collected through an online survey among heavy users of internet ba...

Banking industry in China is facing immense competition from local as well as foreign banks, customers choices regarding banks are expanding. At present, banking is increasingly becoming a consumer-centric service provider. Customers are becoming more quality conscious and are demanding new and qualitative products and services. Six Sigma is a kind of quality enhancement strategy that can help ...

This paper describes a comprehensive usability evaluation of an automated telephone banking system which employs text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis in offering additional detail on customers’ account transactions. The paper describes a series of four experiments in which TTS was employed to offer an extra level of detail to recent transactions listings within an established banking service which ot...

In the last fifteen years, the automatic payment in Portugal has showed periods of very strong growth. In fact, the present Portuguese banking net system has a capacity of more than 90.600 point-of-sale machines, where it is allowed to buy and pay any service in a very comfortable way. Due to the great impact that this service has been getting on the Portuguese population since its appearance i...