Gone are the days of the Clydesdale Bank when it had a reputation of being the businessman's bank, when it looked after its customers and sometimes staff too, when it could make profits without effort, when it could afford to innovate and to effectively become the first bank with an online counter system.

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At SlashSupport in Chennai, 75 to 100 engineers monitor a dozen 75-inch flat screens to analyze a large bank's new online system to avoid crashes.

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Last spring it won permission to inspect the records of customers of PayPal, eBay's online payment system, who have bank or payment-card accounts in tax havens.

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In France, for instance, Minitel, the telephone-based interactive system, allowed customers to bank online from the early 1980s, a decade before the first American pioneers.

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The Bank of China Group, which already has a secure online payment system for Visa cards, is developing another system for BOC's Great Wall card, as well as Visa and Mastercard.

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