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Citibank Gets Into Mobile Banking – Citi Mobile Gives You Account Access On Your Phone

By: , IntoMobile
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 3:02 PM

Citibank offers mobile banking with Citi Mobile 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.

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • xyzzy

    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 ?

  • Will Park

    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?

  • noki0

    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

  • ningthea

    E-banking will be a high risk if the system is not secure. Audit trail and protection systems must be reliable. A number of banks in Indonesia was attacked through exploitation of weaknesses in the ATM. But that case was resolved quickly and encourage the Bank of Indonesia to review and implement a better security system.