Daily we hear news of how mobile banking is either about to take off … or has taken off already. I am sure you have seen the same news items and this is nothing new to any of us.
I do have a problem however…
I have a problem with what is called mobile banking out there. It may just be personal and it is mostly semantics.
A lot of what is out there may be technically called mobile banking since you are able to access standard banking features while mobile. Some of the most basic applications include account balances, bill payments and limited fund transfers. However, I would rather call these applications mobile web banking or banking on a mobile browser or sms banking. There is so much more that can be done and so much room for improvement on a lot of what is out there that I do agree – the market can only grow. In fact I am waiting for that killer banking application… Something that I could actually call true mobile financial services. An application where my needs as a user of financial services are met while being mobile.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it yet.
Of course you need to be aware that I write this from Canadian soil and we are probably much farther behind than most other countries. In fact mobile banking is much bigger in underdeveloped countries than it is in Canada (go ahead click the previous link).
Having said all this take a look at this now old Reuters story on mobile banking taking off in the US (it is old because I started this post a while back and never finished it) … of interest are the following points (Bold Italics are mine):
- Growth is being driven by consumers’ desire to have access to financial services remotely, increased mobile penetration, more sophisticated devices, faster networks and rising familiarity with data applications… Agreed… however, these are not yet leveraged to the extent they can be.
- In the deepening recession, mobile banking is seen as a cost saver for banks, as customers who use mobile banking make fewer calls to customer service. I need to get more info on this. Makes sense to me… and have seen that comment many times before but I haven’t yet seen any real numbers – may have to do first hand research for this.
- The mobile banking market is expected to more than double in 2009 to 21.1 million users … around 35 million users of mobile banking in the U.S. by 2011. Canada is typically about 10% of whatever happens down south … can’t see this here yet. The Canadian banks are not yet playing as they should.
- While SMS is currently the most popular platform, the next stage of mobile banking would be banking that occurs over the Internet on the handset. With the functionality in this current generation of handsets (and those to come) I still can’t believe we are only leveraging SMS. Web makes more sense… but for me the way to go is having a thin client on the handset.
Bit of a rant. I know.
Just saw this story as well on how the over 55 crowd are the prime users of mobile financial services.
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Just out of curiosity, what features would you want in a “true mobile financial services” application that isn’t currently covered in the mobile banking suites that you have seen? If you could build this yourself, what would it look like?