Last week I attended an excellent Executive Summit event hosted by Sybase 365 in the City of London. One of the presentations in the mobile commerce breakout session highlighted the stellar growth that is being seen in mobile banking. Fiserv have also separately this week commented on the growth being seen. For our part, we forecast that users will double in the next 3 years globally to around 400 million.
Whichever figures you use – the only way is up.
And this is without mobile money transfers largely in developing countries by the way, which are seeing high growth also.
However, there will be challenges along the way to this level of adoption. One of the main ones is security. Voice Commerce announced this week the launch of KYC Secure®, which is a regulated mobile identity database enabling FIs to verify a customer’s identity based on their unique biometric Voice Signature™ in order to significantly reduce exposure to online, credit and identity fraud. Accumulate launched the Safe Frame Library to improve mobile banking security.
I expect there to be more and more announcements of security improvements and new products as mobile banking takes hold. Banks need to ensure they play their part too with security guarantees. Many people after all are quite reticent about online banking let alone mobile banking. But it’s more than that. My point is that bank customers need to be convinced of the secure nature of banking on a device that they might leave on a train, or might be stolen. It’s the first point that people make about mobile banking when you raise it with them as the “next big thing”. So plenty of PR, customer communications and guarantees about safety will be required.
Tags: mobile banking, security
Banks could take a look at casino/poker sites as well as e.g. paypal for how they’ve solved anti-fraud etc.
Hi Anders – yes that’s certainly a point. I think the issue is one of convincing users of the strength of security. Thanks for your comment
A practical example:
I can access my bank via their iPhone app, but I can only check transactions on my accounts, move money between them, and control how I can use my credit card. Despite this, it’s a life-saver when buying stuff and my transfer account is empty.
The only info authenticating me is my social security code and a 4 digit PIN.
This would not be acceptable (as the PIN is the only “hard to find” info) if I could transfer money to other peoples’ accounts etc.
On smartphones it would be no problem to use certificates etc, and generally use the same trusted methods as used on PCs, including security terminals, one-time codes etc. That would probably make the acceptance easier too (“use what you already use”).
I agree, Anders. Definitely a good approach for banks to follow, exploiting user familiarity with current methods. One time SMS codes in fact are used in some cases for online banking logins…