Is mobile banking finally here (I mean, in the U.S.)? It has taken financial institutions a long time to understand and feel comfortable with the technologies behind mobile banking, as well as understanding the implications to the financial institutions and to the end-users, as well as how to make money from the service. Remember the old security "WAP gap"? A lot of paranoia back then. Today, end-to-end security from the handset to the server has removed the security gap concerns, and financial institutions have figured out that money is going to be made indirectly, by offering new conveniences, vs. directly by charging for the service.
And while mobile banking hasn't really picked up here in the United States, it is huge in other countries, for example, in Korea where “more than a million Koreans now do their banking via 3G cellphones, according to March 2005 CNN report“. A search on Google for “mobile banking” confirms that mobile banking is almost non-existent in the United States, with few companies offering such solution. The trend graph below from Google trend on “mobile banking” shows not much activity, with activity starting end of last year (2005):
A Forrester 2003 report recommended back then that banks should stick to "simple banking activities on mobile phones, such as SMS alerts and account balance checking.", but there is so much more to mobile banking than just balance checking and alerts… I find interesting that banking alerts is what the mobile banking TV commercial from Chase is promoting… but again there is better functionality, as I recently experienced.
Mobile banking is finally here… TV commercials promoting mobile banking are starting to appear, and in two recent occasions I've used mobile banking for balance checking and for money transfers – very useful and convenient, much better than using Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The application offered by my bank, which was written by MShift, works very well on my Treo 650, with same functionality as the PC/web-based version, and a tabbed-based layout/navigation that simplifies the application usage.
I used to think twice about (mobile) banking from my handset, but today I am sold.
ceo