My mobile app is waiting for me...and waiting for me...and waiting
Banking can be sooooooo complicated. I used to design software and customer service systems for a bank, I should know. I slaved away in the days before user-friendly became a household term, hoping to make interactive banking products and services easier for our customers. (Hey, sometimes we even succeeded).
But now banking has come to almost everybody's mobile phone. There are small banking applications available from many major banks for different types of mobile phones - Blackberry, Android, iPhone. The question is: Is it safe?
It's not that this is keeping me up at night, but I have not yet rushed to activate the banking application I have installed on my iPhone. I just kind of look at it every now and then. Is it really necessary to transfer funds while on the move? Do I need to pay bills while having lunch in the cafe? What's so urgent that it can't wait an hour or two until I get back to my desk? I know in my heart of hearts this is coming down the pike to our collective Digital Future, and yet even I - a former banking software designer - still haven't moved on it.
Scary stories have also already occurred, although in far away places, like...Holland. Check out this story from Wired.com about a nasty worm targeting the money of ING bank customers over there.
Now, granted, you'd have to be an ING bank customer in Holland to worry about it, and you would ALSO had to have "hacked" into your iPhone for the security breach to have worked (something very few people I know have done), but still...I wonder if the public at large is racing to pay its bills and transfer funds over a cup of coffee...and our good old, unreliable cellular networks.
Banks are pretty sure we'd feel this way, so they're offering guarantees. Here's the one from Bank of America.
Sounds good, doesn't it? It makes me want to be experimental and actually, well, bank online. It's the 21st Century, after all.
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