Back to the future?
A GTF reader has commented on a recent article from The Economist on mobile banking. He notes that before online banking, there was closed client-side applications such as Microsoft Money and Inuit’s Quicken. It wasn’t until leading financial institutions migrated their online offerings to their own web sites on the Internet, that they were able to secure mass market adoption for homebanking.
Now the future is looking to mobile access as the next evolution in customer self-service in banking. And suddenly, those old questions surface again – should financial institutions go the proprietary route with a downloadable application, share branding and revenues with third parties, carriers and others; or work on an open platform using the mobile web browser embedded in the mobile phone?
February 28, 2007 at 11:50 am
This could tie in nicely with the mobile as a micro-payment device (cf. DoCoMo in Japan allowing their mobile phone users to buy burgers in McDonalds). Once people get used to seeing their phone as a money ‘container’, they will be much happier to use it for more traditional banking. Not sure about the security aspects though.