Mobile Banking Catching On in US, Slowly

Mobile banking is slowly catching on among U.S. consumers, mainly because of efforts by the largest 15 banks, a Tower Group Inc. analyst said at a conference in Boston Thursday.

The idea that you can move funds at your bank, pay bills or check your account from a cell phone is still somewhat a novelty, said Tower Group analyst Bob Egan, in an interview after a keynote address at the consulting firm's financial services conference.

Only 400,000 consumers are using mobile banking out of almost 240 million mobile phone users in the U.S., Egan said. "It's still modest, but there's a lot of potential growth," he said.

The most common approach used by U.S. banks has been to encourage customers to use a mobile browser to reach an Internet banking application, although some banks are getting customers to load financial applications on their devices, Egan said.

The banks can, and often do, provide their customers such services without directly involving the wireless carriers, so the user gains secure access by "riding the rails" of a wireless network, he said. In that scenario, the user pays for wireless airtime.

While mobile banking capabilities for consumers are evolving slowly, some related financial applications are more robust, such as Fidelity Investments' Fidelity Anywhere program. About 1 million wireless users can access investment accounts from many wireless devices, and can even set triggers for when to buy or sell stock, Fidelity's Chief Wireless Officer Joseph Ferra, said in a recent keynote at Mobile & Wireless World.

Egan said he counts Fidelity's 1 million customers separately from the consumer banking category, although Fidelity Anywhere allows many capabilities for its users that banks want to deploy.

Egan urged banks to partner with mobile carriers to spur mobile banking growth. Without cooperation, growth of mobile banking could be stifled, he said. Market conditions alone do not favor much cooperation, since there are more than 18,000 banks in North America with only six mobile carriers, compared to 7,000 banks and 147 mobile operators in Europe, he said.

There are some examples of cooperation in the U.S. already. In March, Wachovia Corp. said it would launch a third-party mobile banking application with AT&T Inc. wireless customers, starting sometime in the fourth quarter.

Separately, AT&T announced that it had activated mobile banking with BancorpSouth Inc. Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia, which has 15 million residential and business customers, launched in September 2006 its own Wachovia Mobile application that can be used on any wireless network, a spokesman said. But the new application, using AT&T's wireless network and built by Firethorn Holdings LLC, will be simpler to use and will allow bill payment, which isn't available with the Wachovia application, the spokesman added.

By comparison, Bank of America Corp. in March launched mobile banking for 21 million online banking customers, allowing customers to use their cell phones and smart phones to check account balances, pay bills and transfer funds. The service was made possible over four major wireless carriers in the U.S.

Tower Group has conducted internal surveys that show consumers will respond to mobile banking in the U.S. if they feel the banks will support a broad range of devices with good security and a simple user experience.

Egan said banks and financial institutions are also interested in technologies that allow users to pass a cell phone near a wireless receiver to pay for groceries or to gain admission to a sporting event, similar to the way a debit card is used to access funds in an account. Similar to mobile banking technologies, such mobile proximity payment systems will evolve slowly, despite market hype, Egan predicted.

The main reason for the slow evolution of mobile proximity payment is the slow rollout of Near Field Communications technology on cell phones, Egan said. NFC is an open standard separate from Bluetooth and others that transmits data in the 13-MHz band. However, only 154 million NFC-equipped phones are expected to ship by 2010, out of a predicted 3 billion cell phones that will ship then, he said.

In some Asian countries, NFC has been touted as a simple way to board a train and pay for a ticket, but otherwise "there's still not that much use of it," Egan said.