Is it just me, or does mobile banking seem to perpetually be the next big thing?
Maybe it's because I remember how underwhelmed I was by the first generation of WAP browsers on mobile phones when trying to access my bank account in 2000, but over the past decade I can count on one hand the number of times I've done "mobile banking" on
my phone, other than speak to a call centre operative.
Admittedly, the full web browsing capabilities of more recent smartphones now make it more attractive. And so does the wider range of use cases for "mobile banking and payments."
But according to Citi, their abandoned trials in mobile person-to-person payments show them that the demand still isn't there. "U.S. consumers are now just getting comfortable with using their mobile phone for a lot of things," said a Citi MD in
this American Banker article.
So if making it easier to split a dinner bill without using cash isn't the killer app, maybe it will be contactless payments and personal financial management tools?
Cormac Flanagan has an interesting post
here, with a scenario for mobile banking in 2020. It doesn't sound too far fetched, based on technology out there today. But it's a lot easier to predict what technology might be available in the future than it is to predict how people will actually want
to use it.