Mobile Banking May Be Telecom’s Killer App is an interesting story at MediaPost and could well prove to be true.
“With increasing consumer familiarity and growing ease of use, mobile applications for financial services companies–particularly banks–could become the new “killer app” for telecommunications.
The number of people banking through a mobile device could hit half a billion worldwide by 2013, according to ABI Research. “Mobile financial services have the potential to be bigger than mobile TV and premium mobile content in terms of numbers of subscribers,” Mark Beccue, senior analyst of consumer mobility, tells Marketing Daily. “Everybody’s trying to do it, and they’re all scrambling.”
The drive for more and better mobile financial services applications is being fed by consumers who are becoming more accustomed to banking online. “The lowest-hanging fruit are the online customers,” Beccue says. “That’s one of the only barriers to mobile banking; if you don’t trust online, you won’t trust mobile.”
I must say that I’ve been using the online banking almost from the moment they implemented it in Portugal. I’ve never had a problem (of course I know pretty much the safety issues around it and I admit most people are unaware). Particularly I trust my country on this. We have one of the most advanced ATM sytem in the world (that’s true) and our online banking has always been very highly rated internationally – that gives me some comfort.
I also use it on mobile devices (PDA and phone) it works perfectly fine and I never had a problem all these years.
I can do pretty much everything from the online banking. Now in Portugal they are also testing some portable machines that you can actually withdraw money… actually you get some kind of ticket that can be used as money… officially.