International Mobile Banking Updates

Banks warned to keep up with technology or lose customers
"Banks aiming to retain their customers must court the Middle East's young, technologically adept population with innovative payment methods or suffer dwindling profits, a top banker has warned.

Speaking at the Middle East Retail Banking Forum in Dubai, Sanjoy Sen, the regional head of consumer banking at Citibank, said banks should heed the growth of new card payment methods such as Visa payWave and mobile phone payment applications such as Square and Zong."

Standard Chartered Takes Banking Mobile with the Flash Platform
"Standard Chartered, a leading international bank with almost 150 years operating in markets such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East, realized that its customers wanted to bank anywhere, anytime in a simple, convenient and intuitive way. After all, well over half of its customers would be using mobile banking in 2011. Mobile banking, however, can be a Catch-22. The customer experience should be richly functional, versatile and engaging, but whatever Standard Chartered built had to present minimal development costs and a reduced time to market."

ANZ goMoney mobile banking app delivers new way to make payments
"ANZ New Zealand’s mobile banking application, ANZ goMoney is being launched today. The bank says it is the first convenient and simple way for customers to securely transfer money between friends, relatives and businesses using only mobile phone details. Currently available for use on an iPhone, ANZ goMoney is free and can be downloaded via iTunes. The application when launched in Australia by ANZ in August 2010 topped the iTunes charts as the most popular finance application only days after its launch. Currently 280,000 Australian iPhone owners use ANZ goMoney."

Mobile Banking Updates - Aug 9

Zoompass Mobile App for iPhone is Here
"Like all mobile phone users, iPhone users have always been able to use the browser on their phone to access their Zoompass account. But now you can use a dedicated application to access your Zoompass account through your iPhone anytime, anywhere. Instantly send and receive money, request money, check your account balance, track transactions, and more! The Zoompass app for iPhone has a nifty contact manager to help you sync your Zoompass account with the contacts already in your iPhone so you can Zoom money to anyone in your address book with just a few keystrokes."

A Look at Obopay: Mobile Payments Pioneer is Sticking to Its Knitting
"Obopay’s solution allows consumers to make payments to other consumers, by sending an SMS message with their mobile phones. Obopay operates on either a prepaid basis (you fund an Obopay account, and then send funds out of that account) or on a transactional basis – each outbound payment is separately funded. In the prepaid case, funding can be either by credit or debit card, or by an ACH transaction “pulled” from your bank account. The transactional basis requires credit or debit card funding."

Dispatch from Tanzania: Informal Value Transfers via Mobile
"These past few weeks we’ve been focused on Tanzania’s experience with mobile banking. We’re not alone. Gunnar Camner and Emil Sjöblom recently spent three months in Tanzania for their master’s thesis in Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. Their study attempts to investigate mobile banking services from a user perspective. In which contexts do alternative uses, e.g. savings, become popular and why? The final report will be presented during autumn 2009 and made available at the project blog: http://valuablebits.com. Meanwhile, they sent us this dispatch."

City University Ploughs £135K into Mobile Banking
"£135,000 of funding has been provided to City University London from the Government’s UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI). The university has a team of the university’s informatics and engineering specialists who intend to use the funds to develop new and improved security measures to mobile banking"

ECIC Holdings, Lime to launch mobile banking services in the Caribbean
"Caribbean telecommunications operator Lime, a subsidiary of the British-based company Cable & Wireless, has partnered with a number of local financial services providers to launch a mobile banking service, online news outlet sknvibes.com reports."