The MoPR Blog

Online banking revolutionized the way we banked. People today laugh at the thought of balancing your checkbook, viewing it as a practically medieval task. Need to pay your credit card? Need to make sure that check from your roommate didn’t bounce? Want to review your checking account before a night out on the town? You see where I’m going with this. It’s immediate. It’s accurate. And now it’s mobile.

Perhaps to say “now” is rather inaccurate- mobile banking has been around for some time. But only recently have the number of users skyrocketed. Though online banking has long been in effect, the era of mobile banking has taken a little longer to adopt. “Is my information safe?” being the most frequently asked question and source of skepticism.

But it seems as though the majority of users with those fears have brushed them aside. In a recent report by Juniper Research, mobile banking is predicted to hit 150 million subscribers worldwide by 2011.

Key to banks’ business strategies in the years to come, according to the report, will be the growth of the mobile Internet. Benefits like tracking the status of your paycheck while dining with friends or making car payments on the fly are just a couple of examples demonstrating how mobile banking is radically changing the way we handle our money.

Of course, when dealing with financial account and personal information security must be a paramount concern. Many people perceive the mobile Internet to be less secure than accessing the Internet from a home computer. Actually, depending on how a person accesses the Internet from their mobile phone, mobile Internet access can be much more secure. Because mobile devices don’t have the processing power or storage to run robust anti-virus, anti-spyware and other security applications, some mobile banking solutions or mobile web browsers like BOLT from MoPR’s client Bitstream put security systems in place before the data is ever transmitted to the phones. People are notoriously bad for running scans and updating their security software. But with servers in the middle monitored 24 hours a day and with security systems always up-to-date, mobile banking may be the most secure form of digital banking.

And along with an increase in mobile banking comes an increase in person-to-person mobile payments. Nearly three times as many consumers globally will use their mobile phones to make domestic person to person payments than those who will use their mobile phones to conduct traditional banking functions by the end of 2011, according to an ABI Research forecast.

“The developing world is embracing mobile domestic person-to-person payments with enthusiasm wherever they are offered,” says senior analyst Mark Beccue. “It is becoming the first financial service for previously ‘unbanked’ people, and may make a real contribution towards lifting them out of poverty.”

So what’s next? I’m pushing for the elimination of credit and debit cards all together- isn’t there some way to use our mobiles for that, too? Well, yes. It’s called “contactless payments,” but that’s a subject for another post.