Purpose Online banking, a phenomenon widely adopted and appreciated in developing and developed countries, is becoming an essential part of the lives of people from all walks of life, but there exist a good fraction of customers resisting these services. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the barriers generating resistance to online banking. The special focus of the paper is to explore resistance among bank customers who already have valid contracts for online banking but still prefer to approach the traditional branches for transactions. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the objective, interpretive structural modelling (ISM) with cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) approach is used to investigate the interrelationships among the barriers to online banking. Findings Online banking, although proven to be a glorious innovation, has still not been adopted by all, and hence, has not met all the expectations of banks and banking sector. The outcome shows that the online illiteracy and online unawareness are the most important barriers and these two are working as the root cause and demand strong attention on part of the banking sector which is working towards the inclusion of customers to online banking. These findings may help the Indian banking sector in identifying the crucial points that affect online banking system in India the most. Originality/value This research explored the interactions among the barriers to online banking in the Indian scenario and revealed significant results through the ISM-based technique.