New initiatives in Mobile Banking

New initiatives in mobile banking is now being announced all of the time. Just a sample of the announcements made during the past week is given below.

Citibank launches mobile bill payment service in Malaysia - Citibank launched a new service in Malaysia that will enable its customers to pay bills using their mobile handsets. The SMS-based service enables customers to use their credit cards to pay bills. Customers can also receive reminders when bills need paying and personalise their payments by assigning key words or texts.

Masabi signs YourRail to mobile ticketing technology. YourRail has contracted London-based Masabi to build a mobile application which enabled train tickets to be securely bought and displayed on mobile phones.

Vodafone offers direct access to bank accounts via MoniLink. The service allows customers of MoniLink banks to check their balance, request a mini-statement and top-up their or their friends'/family's 'pay as you talk' mobile phones. The Monilink system has been set up by Monitise and VocaLink and has so far signed up HSBC, first direct, Alliance & Leicester, Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank in Northern Ireland.

Wells Fargo and Visa to conduct public mobile payments trial. Wells Fargo and Visa are to undertake a public trial of mobile payments technology with up to 500 customers in the fourth quarter of the year. The move to a public pilot follows positive feedback from an internal laboratory trial conducted by the bank in April.

Alliance & Leicester is to pay younger customers £10 for signing up to its mobile banking services. A&L is introducing the offer to customers who have signed up to its Premier 21 current account. But the bank says only the first 20,000 customers who register for the m-banking service and use it before the end of June will receive the £10.

Telsecure launches securePay m-payments system in UK. UK mobile payments start-up Telsecure is launching its securePay front-end payments system that is designed to protect customers from card-not-present (CNP) fraud. Telsecure said in 2003 that it was teaming with business and technology consultancy Generics Group to develop the mobile authentication system, which uses a cardholder's mobile hand set to verify and authenticate transactions made via the Internet, mail and telephone.

What is interesting about most of these announcements is that they almost all are from UK banks and mobile operators. Does this mean that the UK has now become the hot-bed for mobile banking/payments. Or is this only because the British like to talk about what they do more?

It would be interesting to know how many initiatives are being launched that is not announced. We at Fundamo, have deployed a number of mobile banking initiatives for clients that has not been announced. So this may point to much more activity in this space that is just not visible to all. I think it is safe to say that mobile banking is taking off.