One of the easiest ways to make your business more eco-friendly is to eliminate paper waste, and one of the most wasteful industries when it comes to needless paper usage are traditional banks. 

However, online banking gives you the option not only to control your own paper use but to select the services of an industry that focuses on online communications and data retention over paper trails.

Let’s take a closer look at the ways in which online banks have embraced the benefits of digitization as an eco-friendly business opportunity.

Smaller Carbon Footprint

Online banking means that you don’t have to travel to a branch, reducing your carbon emissions. With banks moving to online services, the need for large, often vacuous office spaces, has been eliminated, meaning that less energy is used for lighting, climate control, and other functions.

While most banks offer online services now, EMIs have long offered all their information and services electronically. People working for EMIs often work from home or in smaller offices, so you are helping to reduce their footprint too by choosing to do your business banking online.

Less Paper

When you go to a physical branch, there are deposit slips, checks, withdrawal slips, and all manner of other paperwork for funds transfers, loans, and credit applications. Thereafter the bank tellers likely use large amounts of paper to further process your documents, making copies and filling in other pages. Reams of paper are used just to make simple requests.

Online banking makes all these processes electronic and stores the data in a more secure way, often in a cloud. There is no need for copies, stamps, and signatures, it is all done online and verified by passcodes and other security protections.

Online banking means that your bank statement, which you can access at any time, never needs to be printed – which is more secure and far more environmentally friendly. When you consider just how much paper is used in traditional banking, it starts to prove itself as insecure, prone to error and loss, and wasteful.

The digitization of record-keeping and the elimination of paper forms is a positive influence on the environment and security.

Savings

Online operations are far cheaper than the costs of operating traditional banks. While some banks launched digital services many years ago, those that have delayed the upgrading of their services are far behind the leaders.

Traditional banks and insurance companies have used customer funds to invest in mining, pipeline building, mineral exploration, and various other projects that some people might feel uncomfortable with, but are not aware that their money is being used to support.

Smaller EMIs are less interested in making money from investing customer funds into often questionable operations. Online operators do not have the financing needed to make big investments into oil and gas companies and are often focused on fintech, digital development, and other online services that are seen as the future of the global economy.

By choosing an EMI over a traditional bank, there are benefits that include eco-consciousness that traditional banks have often failed to provide.