Mobile banking


Mobile banking is a service that allows a bank's customers to conduct financial transactions using a mobile device. Unlike the related internet banking it uses software, usually an app, provided by the bank. Mobile banking is usually available on a 24-hour basis.
Transactions through mobile banking depend on the features of the mobile banking app provided and typically includes obtaining account balances and lists of latest transactions, electronic bill payments, remote check deposits, P2P payments, and funds transfers between a customer's or another's accounts. Some apps also enable copies of statements to be downloaded and sometimes printed at the customer's premises. Using a mobile banking app increases ease of use, speed, flexibility and also improves security because it integrates with the user built-in mobile device security mechanisms.
From the bank's point of view, mobile banking reduces the cost of handling transactions by reducing the need for customers to visit a bank branch for non-cash withdrawal and deposit transactions. Mobile banking does not handle transactions involving cash, and a customer needs to visit an ATM or bank branch for cash withdrawals or deposits. Many apps now have a remote deposit option; using the device's camera to digitally transmit cheques to their financial institution.
Mobile banking differs from mobile payments, which involves the use of a mobile device to pay for goods or services either at the point of sale or remotely, analogous to the use of a debit or credit card.

History

The earliest mobile banking services used SMS, a service known as SMS banking. With the introduction of smart phones with WAP support enabling the use of the mobile web in 1999, the first European banks started to offer mobile banking on this platform to their customers.
Mobile banking before 2010 was most often performed via SMS or the mobile web. Apple's initial success with the iPhone and the rapid growth of phones based on Google's Android operating system have led to increasing use of special mobile apps, downloaded to the mobile device. With that said, advancements in web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript have seen more banks launching mobile web based services to complement native applications. These applications are consisted of a web application module in JSP such as J2EE and functions of another module J2ME.
A recent study by Mapa Research suggests that over a third of banks have mobile device detection upon visiting the banks' main website. A number of things can happen on mobile detection such as redirecting to an app store, redirection to a mobile banking specific website or providing a menu of mobile banking options for the user to choose from.

Concept

In one academic model, mobile banking is defined as:

Mobile Banking refers to provision and availment of banking- and financial services with the help of mobile telecommunication devices.The scope of offered services may include facilities to conduct bank and stock market transactions, to administer accounts and to access customised information."

According to this model mobile banking can be said to consist of three inter-related concepts:
Most services in the categories designated accounting and brokerage are transaction-based. The non-transaction-based services of an informational nature are however essential for conducting transactions – for instance, balance inquiries might be needed before committing a money remittance. The accounting and brokerage services are therefore offered invariably in combination with information services. Information services, on the other hand, may be offered as an independent module.
Mobile banking may also be used to help in business situations as well as for financial situation

Mobile banking services

Typical mobile banking services may include:

Account information

  1. Mini-statements and checking of account history
  2. Alerts on account activity or passing of set thresholds
  3. Monitoring of term deposits
  4. Access to loan statements
  5. Access to card statements
  6. Mutual funds / equity statements
  7. Insurance policy management

    Transaction

  8. Funds transfers between the customer's linked accounts
  9. Paying third parties, including bill payments and third party fund transfers
  10. Check Remote Deposit

    Investments

  11. Portfolio management services
  12. Real-time stock

    Support

  13. Status of requests for credit, including mortgage approval, and insurance coverage
  14. Check book and card requests
  15. Exchange of data messages and email, including complaint submission and tracking
  16. ATM Location
  17. Loan Application

    Content services

  18. General information such as finance related news
  19. Loyalty-related offers
A report by the US Federal Reserve found that 21 percent of mobile phone owners had used mobile banking in the past 12 months. Based on a survey conducted by Forrester, mobile banking will be attractive mainly to the younger, more "tech-savvy" customer segment. A third of mobile phone users say that they may consider performing some kind of financial transaction through their mobile phone. But most of the users are interested in performing basic transactions such as querying for account balance and making bill.

Challenges

Key challenges in developing a sophisticated mobile banking application are :

Handset accessibility

There are a large number of different mobile phone devices and it is a big challenge for banks to offer a mobile banking service on any type of device. Some of these devices support Java ME and others support SIM Application Toolkit, a WAP browser, or only SMS.
Initial interoperability issues however have been localized, with countries like India using portals like "R-World" to enable the limitations of low end java based phones, while focus on areas such as South Africa have defaulted to the USSD as a basis of communication achievable with any phone.
The desire for interoperability is largely dependent on the banks themselves, where installed applications provide better security, are easier to use and allow development of more complex capabilities similar to those of internet banking while SMS can provide the basics but becomes difficult to operate with more complex transactions.
There is a myth that there is a challenge of interoperability between mobile banking applications due to perceived lack of common technology standards for mobile banking. In practice it is too early in the service lifecycle for interoperability to be addressed within an individual country, as very few countries have more than one mobile banking service provider. In practice, banking interfaces are well defined and money movements between banks follow the IS0-8583 standard. As mobile banking matures, money movements between service providers will naturally adopt the same standards as in the banking world.
In January 2009, Mobile Marketing Association Banking Sub-Committee, chaired by CellTrust and VeriSign Inc., published the Mobile Banking Overview for financial institutions in which it discussed the advantages and disadvantages of Mobile Channel Platforms such as Short Message Services, Mobile Web, Mobile Client Applications, SMS with Mobile Web and Secure SMS.

Security

As with most internet-connected devices, as well as mobile-telephony devices, cybercrime rates are escalating year-on-year. The types of cybercrimes which may affect mobile-banking might range from unauthorized use while the owner is using the mobile banking, to remote-hacking, or even jamming or interference via the internet or telephone network data streams. This is demonstrated by the malware called SMSZombie.A, which infected Chinese Android devices. It was embedded in wallpaper apps and installed itself so it can exploit the weaknesses of China Mobile SMS Payment system, stealing banks credit card numbers and information linked to financial transactions. A malware discovered recently was the Trojan called Bankbot. It went past Google's protections in its Android app marketplace and targeted mobile banking customers on Android devices worldwide before its removal by Google in September 2017.
In the banking world, currency rates may change by the millisecond.
Security of financial transactions, being executed from some remote location and transmission of financial information over the air, are the most complicated challenges that need to be addressed jointly by mobile application developers, wireless network service providers and the banks' IT departments.
One-time passwords are one tool used by financial and banking service providers in the fight against cyber fraud. Instead of relying on traditional memorized passwords, OTPs are requested by consumers each time they want to perform transactions using the online or mobile banking interface. When the request is received the password is sent to the consumer's phone via SMS. The password is expired once it has been used or once its scheduled life-cycle has expired.

Scalability and reliability

Another challenge for the CIOs and CTOs of the banks is to scale-up the mobile banking infrastructure to handle exponential growth of the customer base. With mobile banking, the customer may be sitting in any part of the world and hence banks need to ensure that the systems are up and running in a true 24 × 7 fashion. As customers will find mobile banking more and more useful, their expectations will increase. Banks unable to meet the performance and reliability expectations may lose customer confidence. There are systems such as Mobile Transaction Platform which allow quick and secure mobile enabling of various banking services. Recently in India there has been a phenomenal growth in the use of Mobile Banking applications, with leading banks adopting Mobile Transaction Platform and the Central Bank publishing guidelines for mobile banking operations.