Monday, January 19, 2009

Anyone doing Mobile Banking in the UK?

Mobilink have released its latest analysis of its customer base.  It says that the service is used by young families and new home owners.  So I guess that at the moment this is a service for the person concerned about budgets rather than someone looking to replace cheques to make P-2-P payments.

I talk to quite a few people about mobile usage and whilst I have been told about M-Banking by those from Pakistan, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and America no one in the UK other than people working in the Banking Payments community have used Mobilink.  Thus I have to question the validity of the report.

Since 2005 I have been evangelising Mobile Banking, it is a service that I am confident will happen on all phones.  The technology is simple in that text based, browser based and Java solutions are available dependent on the type of handset and transaction you are attempting.  On a simple level once people replace bank details with a mobile number it will be easy to transfer funds by text rather than write a cheque, with a small fee more and more will also pay by phone rather than use small value notes and coins.

With the Banks looking at the cost base as well as their capitaisation I feel that they will seek to become more local and less international.  Using the mobile phone rather than Internet Banking will be a technology that the consumer adopts, too many of us share a computer but very few share a phone and so it is more secure and we almost always carry a phone whilst most of us have a static computer (even if it is a laptop).


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, though I did get a Nokia 'matrix' phone from the Halifax

Mike1727 said...

I don't think mobiles will replace internet banking, they'll be an addition. I wouldn't want to do most of my banking via a mobile (even a G1) but the occasional payment /balance check would be ok.

Paypal do mobile transfers.