Raymond Forrest, Business Columnist

Financial institutions have invested heavily in modern technology to reduce human cost and improve speed banking.

There is one major downside that could hurt their future plans, however, as more of their customers live to longer ages and have to rely on all types of electronic code numbers to access their accounts.

With such older customers will come a gradual loss of memory and worst, in the case of those who suffer from Alzheimer's, they may find it difficult to access their accounts without much help.

In the 21st century, in order to access all kinds of telephone services, banking accounts, and do all kinds of electronic banking, we are now required to know key passwords in order to access these accounts or to do certain kinds of transactions.

With the increasing use of multi-linked computer technologies, we are fast removing the human interface for many of these transactions.

remembering passwords

What will happen in the future, however, when older persons find it more and more difficult to remember which passwords work or open which account is going to be an explosive issue unless we start to monitor these customers (golden-agers) and understand the likely frustration they will encounter.

To ensure greater safety, more common-day transactions are undergoing encrypted passwords in order to access automated machines, but at the same time, we run the loss of their owners having to either write down these numbers (which reduces the safety benefit) or having close personal relatives or friends who they can rely on to do their various business transactions.

For the more affluent golden-agers, as more family members migrate (externally to other countries or even internally to another distant parish) they will find that they will have less persons around them who they can trust.

For those older persons who have Alzheimer's, the odds of forgetting key passwords numbers is high. To compound it, a lot of older persons also value their independence and want to conduct their own affairs at their convenience. We are going to have to balance the benefits versus the costs of electronic banking using pass-codes for these older persons.

less banking staff

With less inter-personal banking transactions being done in the future, we will also see less banking staff knowing their customers by sight (due to familiarity), so this also raises the chances of bank fraud by unscrupulous persons, taking advantage of this dilemma. It's an interesting issue in which the banker's association, the pensioners association and the returning residents association should all have some interest.

In order to access all kinds of and do all kinds of electronic banking, we are now required to know key passwords.