By silicon.com, 13 December 2005 11:00
Other than carting your own ATM around on a forklift, it's pretty hard to get real mobile access to your money at the moment. But in the next few months banks will be improving their mobile phone-based banking services significantly.
This is still a very early market with a number of competing technologies.
Some are trying to replicate the ubiquity of the ATM network by letting consumers use one application to access all their different banks.
Meanwhile some banks are forging ahead on their own, signing deals with individual telecoms operators to take advantage of the new technologies being rolling out.
Whoever gets the mobile phone banking technology right has the chance to grab a big new market.
Being able to check your balance before you make a big purchase would be very attractive to many users - and much easier than having to find a bank and then queue up to use the hole in the wall.
But it's the future potential that is the most exciting bit. What if you could text money to a friend stuck with an empty bank account and needing a cab home?
Wouldn't it be great to text them a tenner and then have them use their mobile to pay for the cab home? And then to text it back to you when they've been paid?
Mobile banking struggled the first time round because it couldn't give people what they really wanted - access to their money on the go.
Or a phone that would let you text money to someone who needs a quick loan.
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