Mobile
banking (also known as M-Banking, mbanking) is a term used for performing
balance checks, account transactions, payments, credit applications and other
banking transactions through a mobile device such as a mobile phone or Personal
Digital Assistant (PDA).
Mobile
banking and Mobile payments are often, incorrectly, used interchangeably. The
two terms are differentiated by their service provider-to-consumer
relationship; financial institution-to-consumer versus commercial
institution-to-consumer for mobile banking and payments, respectively. Mobile
Banking involves using mobile devices gain to access financial services. Mobile
payments on the other hand may be defined as the use of mobile devices to pay
for goods or services either at the point of purchase or remotely. Bill payment
is not considered a form of mobile payment because it does not occur in real
time.
The
earliest mobile banking services were offered over SMS, a service known as SMS
banking. With the introduction of the first primitive 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 has until recently (2010) most often been performed via SMS or the
mobile web. Apple's initial success with iPhone and the rapid growth of phones
based on Google's Android (operating system) have led to increasing use of
special client programs, called 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 compliment native
applications. A recent study (May 2012) 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 of which visiting
the main homepage is one.
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