Mobile banking (also known as M-Banking, mbanking) is a term used for performing balance checks, account transactions, payments, credit applications and other banking transactions through a mobile device such as a mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Mobile banking and Mobile payments are often, incorrectly, used interchangeably. The two terms are differentiated by their service provider-to-consumer relationship; financial institution-to-consumer versus commercial institution-to-consumer for mobile banking and payments, respectively. Mobile Banking involves using mobile devices gain to access financial services. Mobile payments on the other hand may be defined as the use of mobile devices to pay for goods or services either at the point of purchase or remotely. Bill payment is not considered a form of mobile payment because it does not occur in real time.
The earliest mobile banking services were offered over SMS, a service known as SMS banking. With the introduction of the first primitive smart phones with WAP support enabling the use of the mobile web in 1999, the first European banks started to offer mobile banking on this platform to their customers.
Mobile banking has until recently (2010) most often been performed via SMS or the mobile web. Apple's initial success with iPhone and the rapid growth of phones based on Google's Android (operating system) have led to increasing use of special client programs, called apps, downloaded to the mobile device. With that said, advancements in web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript have seen more banks launching mobile web based services to complement native applications. A recent study (May 2012) by Mapa Research suggests that over a third of banks have mobile device detection upon visiting the banks' main website. A number of things can happen on mobile detection such as redirecting to an app store, redirection to a mobile banking specific website or providing a menu of mobile banking options for the user to choose from of which visiting the main homepage is one.
Read more about Mobile Banking: A Mobile Banking Conceptual Model, Mobile Banking Business Models, Mobile Banking in The World
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