Citibank Gets Into Mobile Banking – Citi Mobile Gives You Account Access On Your Phone
By Will Park on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 3:02 PM PST In Announcements, Services, Technologies
Citibank just announced that they will be extending their online banking system to your mobile phone. The geniuses responsible for Citibank’s mobile technology have released the fumbling Citi Mobile service – which requires users to sign up for the service and download the software onto their phones.
By agreeing to clutter your cell phone’s precious storage space and use their proprietary software, Citibank promises to deliver 128-bit encryption strength access to your account. But the major downfall here, which seems to be the trend in the US, is the complete lack of any mobile payment system. The software offers no possibility for any mobile transactions, but at least you can view real-time account balances and activity.
The technical directors at Citibank, Visa, and Cingular must really think that software-based banking is the future. And, unfortunately, with all the big-hitters forcing software-based solutions on us, it is likely to be the future of mobile banking in the United States.
Expect to see this service rolling through California later this week and a mid-year rollout for the rest of Citibank’s customers.
1) By giving You their software, they take the responsibility of it working. Browser is not necessarily the best e-banking interface.
2) Speaking of precious memory on the phone when You have several tens of megabytes inside device and one or two gigabytes on the storage card is a bit of exaggeration. isn’t it ?
1) While a browser is not the most secure, text-based payment systems using PIN identification would be secure as well, in my opinion. And text-based payments through ClairMail (http://www.intomobile.com/2007/04/02/text-message-based-mobile-banking-for-north-america-canada.html) uses multi-level authentication (the person has the phone, logs onto system, verification text, one time PIN, session validation, etc.)
2) The software will likely not be executable from a storage card or other expansion media, only from the phone’s main memory. Tens of megabytes are usually partially occupied by ROM and RAM. That last few hundred kilobytes of RAM will turn out to be more precious than gold when you run out and can’t start any new programs.
Keep in mind that ringtones and text messeges/emails are usually stored in main memory as well.
I’m not trying to say you are wrong – software specific solutions are incredibly secure. But it is by no means the only secure solution (http://www.clairmail.com/products/security.php). And proprietary, non-standardized software poses even more problems. Maybe a standardized protocol for online banking would be a good compromise?
any idea on what platform this software will run on? is it java or something? if so, forget it…
most phones I’ve had experience with run java apps like crap.
@xyzzy – not everyone has an expansion card to work with, and Citibank is probably targeting this at the mass market or else it wouldnt be worthwhile for them to release it. It’s not like it’s making them any money and probably not going to convert many new customers. – just my opinion