The start of a new era is upon us, as banking using your mobile phone is being developed and will be available within a few months. Several high street banks plan to launch a service which will allow customers to use their mobile phones as virtual cash machines.
Although they won’t actually dispense money. Some of the features provided will allow customers to instantly move money between accounts, view up-to-date balances, check recent transactions and top up their mobile phones.
Lloyds already offers a text service that warns its customers when balances fall within £50 of their limit, or if a payment such as a standing order cannot be made.
The service will be expanded to include text alerts to warn customers when their balances exceed a specified level, allowing them to move any excess into a savings account using the specially designed interface on their mobile phone. Weekly alerts will also be provided, notifying customers of account balances and the 6 most recent transactions.
The proposed services meet international security standards, providing customers with a six digit code used to access the services and will request an account name on registering for the service to ensure only authenticated users can see details such as bank account numbers and sort codes.
Mobile phone banking services are already out there in the primitive stages, Egg customers are currently able to access their bank balances via O2’s i-mode service.
An Egg spokesman commented: “A few years ago Egg started off with a WAP service which didn’t really take off. WAP was fairly primitive – for example just looking at your bank account balance. What consumers are willing to do now with mobile phones is significantly more than we would in the days of WAP.”
But soon other banks plan to give customers the functionality to move funds to between accounts using a text message. He added: “In the first wave it will be about balances but our aspiration – and we have the ability in place – is to move money between different accounts by mobile phone and send each other money by text message. You can see how the mobile phone could be a very interesting way of managing your money on the move.”
O2 are currently the only network providing the first stages of this technology, which limits the customers that have the capability to use it. The spokesman said: “Our intention is not to limit ourselves to one provider – O2 were the first to launch this in the UK and it makes sense with them but that doesn’t mean we will only have a service on O2.”
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