RSSCingular to Offer Banking by Cell Phone
By Ed Oswald | Published March 27, 2007, 2:40 PM
Cingular has signed deals with several banks that will eventually allow it to offer services that let its customers manage their accounts and pay bills via their cell phones, it said Tuesday.
The service will be available to customers that download a special application, and belong to banks managed by Wachovia, BancorpSouth, Regions Financial, and SunTrust among others. There will be no additional fee to use the service.
Wachovia operates banks in 21 states, while Regions Financial operates banks under the Regions and AmSouth names in 16 states across the Midwest and South. SunTrust operates throughout 10 states, and BanCorpSouth in six states across the southern US.
A multi-million dollar marketing campaign is planned to promote the service, which Cingular -- soon to be AT&T -- hopes will spur use of its premium Internet service. The application will be included on handsets beginning later in the year.
AT&T cites market research that showed many customers found the service to be quite useful, and more than three-quarters said that it could help them in making better decisions on spending money.
Oh, this should be rich.
So what kind of encryption will be employed? And secure authentication?
As easy as it is to sniff cell phone traffic, here comes the next targeted security breaches.
I guess we should also anticipate the next round of self-righteous ranters complaining that someone has broken into their online account and how the telcos and banks are to blame. Right.
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Sorry, how easy is it to sniff cell phone traffic? You realise they don't use analogue signals any more, right? And you realise mobile phone browsers can use secure layer encryption?
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Amazing, we finally catching on. We are only behind Asia and Europe by like 5 to 10 years.
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I think it's painful enough to navigate most banks' websites, never mind trying to do it on a cellphone. Seems to me that most of the web developers at banks have no clue how to improve the user experience.
In any case, I think one is far better off using a n independent product such as Quicken because you're not tied to a particular bank.
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I agree, just today I was trying to check my account on my BlackJack, the UI of my bank's online account system is composed of a page with 3 frames, scrolling was nearly impossible because it would get "stuck" in one frame. I called my bank once to ask if they were planning on making a mobile site/version of their online system and the lady that answered the phone had no idea what I was talking about. Oh well.
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Just wonder if those services will be free...
Better download Opera Mobile or Opera Mini (if you haven't done this already) and do banking for free.
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"The service will be available to customers that download a special application... There will be no additional fee to use the service."
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Been bankin on my cell for 2 years already. This is news?
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