Computerization In Banking

Virtually all the commercial banks in Ghana are spending huge sums of money in acquisition of Information Technology equipment and devices, networking their various branches and hiring of Information Technology personnel to manage these items. The use of these equipment and devices is associated with huge cost of training staff which will negatively affect the balance sheet of the banks in the short run. These commercial banks acquire a number of ATM machines, Computers and very expensive software, issuing of electronic cards, etc. all at a cost to the banks.

Rural banks in Ghana have recently adopted computerization of their businesses like these commercial banks. As a result, it has become necessary to find out whether IT really impact positively

This was the foundation era of information system (IS), Management Information Systems (MIS), and Decision Support Systems (DSS). All processes were centrally handled using applications software that were developed with the third generation of programming languages. The next decades witnessed the fusion of telecommunications and networking technologies for business deployment. This ushered in distributed data processing, office information systems (OIS), and personal computers (PCs). Prominent among the goals of business enterprises at this time was enhancement in the quality of products and services, hence, investments in total quality management (TQM) characterized the strategy of the leading organizations of the

Singh (2002) opined that technology has introduced new ways of delivering banking services and products to customers, such as ATMs, and internet banking (IB). Hence banks have found themselves at the forefront of technology adoption for the past two decades. These changes and developments in the banking industry have impact on service quality, future of the banking activities, and consequently its continually competitive ability in the world markets since going along with technology is one of the most important factors of economic organizations success in general and rural banks in particular (Nyangosi, 2009).

The adoption of information technology in the rural banking sector is also attributable owing to the fact that, linguistic barriers needed to be put to an end to enable easy and cheaper communication during transaction, to foster customer-bank relationship, increase customer satisfaction, improve operational efficiency, reduce the running cost, reduce transaction time, give rural banks competitive edge, provide security to investors fund and promotion of other financial