‘RBS to introduce mobile phone banking’
August 27, 2007 at 12:32 pm
After telephone banking and internet banking came mobile banking. We now can’t go anywhere without being able to see how much money we’re all spending. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is the latest high-street bank to offer its 13 million customers the new mobile banking service.
Customers who have a debit card will soon be able to register for the service, which is provided for the banks by an independent company called Monilink. With the suitable applications downloaded to their handsets, bank statements can be viewed and, in the near future, money can be transferred. Once you have the software on your phone, it is then encoded to that particular handset and not run through an external server, so a fraudster cannot hack into it.
The average fee is 20p per balance inquiry and 25p for a mini-statement. There is no monthly subscription fee. Paul Greddes, the CEO of RBS Consumer Banking said “Mobile phone banking will give people another easy way to access account information and even greater flexibility with their money”.
RBS are by no means the pioneers of this service. In October 2006, HSBC launched their own mobile phone banking service, and even back in 1999 HSBC got the whole ball rolling by offering weekly texts to their customers updating them on their account details. Proving very successful the ‘m-commerce’ service was then launched, also in partnership with Monilink.
HSBC, along with all the high-street banks, know how anxious their customers could feel about such a service, which is why they are rolling it out very slowly and one step at a time. It is beginning with simple ‘read-only’ services but then working towards the sort of full service that internet banking now offers.
Monilink was forged in 2003 between Montise and Link (UK) and provides this new service for mobile phones. All of the mobile phone networks in the UK can now use Monilnk, and so far, HSBC, First Direct, Alliance and Leicester, RBS and soon Natwest have signed up to offer it.
One area of scepticism with such a service is the security risks. Internet banking has already been the subject of a number of fraud incidents and now mobile phones might be considered to be more of a risk. In 2004, there was a huge security breach with the internet bank Cahoot, which, for a brief time, gave hackers access to any customer’s account. There have also been incidences with ‘clone’ sites that can trick people into typing in their log-in details but to a bogus site.
Up to 15 million people in the UK are now using internet banking in some way. Decent security PC software, careful monitoring of unexpected e-mails from what might be a so-called “bank” and not saving details on a public computer are just some ways one can lower the risk of hackers.
In an age when technological advancements arrive every year, will the cashier at our local branch soon become a thing of the past? Or will people always want to speak to a person rather than a screen or a monitor?
