STUDY ON THE EVOLUTION AND USE OF INTERNET BANKING SERVICES IN ROMANIA

Nowadays, Internet banking is a service provided by all Romanian banks which has become a daily need for millions of users. This study contains a brief overview of the Internet banking services usage level in the European Union for the period 2007-2016. An increasing in the use of Internet banking services in the EU can be observed at the level of the analysed period. At the same time we compared the users (individuals aged 16 to 74) of Internet banking services to other European countries and we found that the users of the Internet banking services in Romania are still far below the European average but the trend is an upward one. In this study we have focused our attention only on Internet banking, as it is the most commonly used payment instrument in the Romanian practice of remote access payment instruments. The indicators considered in this study were the Internet banking users and the Internet users. We have used the model of the simple linear regression to highlight the existence of a relationship between the variables. In this respect we used statistical data taken from Eurostat and Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Society as well as data provided by the Romanian National Institute of Statistics for the period 2009-2014. The results of the model have pointed out the fact that the rise of the number of Internet users leads to an increase of the number of Internet banking users.