It’s your phone, your music player and your laptop, and one day it might even be your wallet.Several financial institutions with a presence in Northeast Ohio, including some of the state’s largest banks, are starting to let customers use their mobile phones to do their banking.An increasing number of banks are allowing customers to get information via text messages and to conduct some transactions using the Internet browsers available on most mobile phones.Those offerings are steppingstones to the industry’s larger goal to turn mobile phones into electronic wallets that can make transactions normally reserved for checkbooks, debit cards and cash, said Roger Entner, senior vice president of the communications sector at IAG Research, which has offices in New York and Los Angeles.“A lot of people see this as the next stage,” Mr. Entner said.National City Corp. released its first mobile banking product in February when it began letting customers send text messages to receive information such as balance updates and lists of recent transactions, said Tom Trebilcock, vice president of E-Business and Payments for PNC Financial Services Group Inc., which late last year bought National City.PNC released a similar product last October, and four months prior it released software that customers could download onto their phones, allowing them to pay bills, transfer funds between accounts and find bank branches and ATMs.“It’s really just like online banking on the go,” Mr. Trebilcock said.PNC’s largest local rival, Cleveland-based KeyCorp, is developing mobile products that it plans to release sometime this year, said David Reavis, senior vice president and public relations manager. He would not give more detail about the plans.Other banks starting to push mobile banking technology in Northeast Ohio include Fifth Third Bancorp of Cincinnati and Huntington Bancshares Inc. of Columbus.Fifth Third launched its mobile banking products in the region on March 19, said Paul Moore, senior vice president and director of alternative delivery. Now the bank’s customers here can set up text message alerts that let them know when bills are due or when account balances have reached certain levels. The bank also launched a web site, www.53.mobi, meant to make it easy to transfer funds, check transactions and find branches and ATMs on a small screen.Mobile technology is an “emerging channel” that Fifth Third could not ignore, Mr. Moore said, especially because other banks, particularly the bigger ones, have started pushing mobile products.“Other banks are out there, so we have to remain competitive,” he said.About 5% of Huntington’s online banking customer use its mobile web site, activated last July, and another 5% use its text messaging service, launched in January, said Brandon McGee, vice president and senior product manager of mobile technology.
Mr. Trebilcock said mobile banking is taking hold now because carrier networks and mobile phone technology have progressed to the point where customers “can actually have a pretty decent user experience.”Plus, mobile banking has proven to be secure, Mr. McGee said, noting that mobile phones are no different than small PCs. To reassure customers, however, Huntington offers to repay any funds lost because of mobile banking, he said.“We have not had a single instance of fraud, period,” Mr. McGee said.Although mobile products mostly are offered by big institutions, some small ones are getting into the act.Akron Firefighters Credit Union, with help from the company that handles its data processing, offers text banking services as well as a web site accessible by a mobile browser, said CEO Linda Williams.About 10% of the credit union’s members frequently use the products, which Ms. Williams wanted to implement after watching how her adult children use their phones.“My children are in that age bracket,” she said. “That’s what they do. They wanted texting.”Diebold Inc. also stands to benefit from the adoption of such technology. The North Canton-based maker of ATMs, bank security equipment and electronic voting machines in about two months expects to begin selling banks access to its mobile banking software, said Keith Lewis, director of marketing at Diebold.“I get requests probably every couple weeks from another customer who is interested in mobile banking,” Mr. Lewis said.Demand should keep growing, according to statistics from ABI Research, a New York-based technology research firm: The number of people using mobile banking services grew to 3.1 million in 2008 from 400,000 in 2007, and the number should hit 7 million this year.The available technologies should keep growing as well. PNC’s Mr. Trebilcock said he could say little about the company’s plans, but both Fifth Third’s Mr. Moore and Huntington’s Mr. McGee said consumers one day might be able to wave a phone over a product to buy it.The combination of such technologies with the popularity of mobile phones leads Mr. McGee to believe that the personal computer may not always be the medium of choice for electronic banking.“Mobile banking will pass online banking,” he said.
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