Mobile Banking

The bar has been raised again for mobile services.

USAA is a financial services company for military personnel and their families. They recently announced a new mobile initiative whereby members can use their iPhone to deposit checks by taking a photograph of the check with their iPhone camera and submitting the photo as the deposit. There are some restrictions of course, but this is a huge leap forward in mobility. I assume this works by having the bank’s servers run a scan of the image and confirming that it captured the amount, account number and routing number from the check. I suspect the major US banks are looking into similar functionality in an effort to retain and attract customers.

This is what I like so much about all of the work on mobility that’s happening now. When a services company can take a fairly routine aspect of their business and make that available on a mobile platform, and eliminate the need for the customer to travel to a facility to conduct business, this is a game-changer. Any incremental advance in service delivery by one company forces the rest of the industry to keep up, and this kind of innovation can only be good for the customer.

Wells Fargo doesn’t offer anything like this yet, but they do have a couple of nice mobile offerings:

wf.com

With your phone’s browser, go to www.wf.com for the mobile-optimized Wells Fargo site. The interface is very lean and simplified for the small screen and provides a nice way to do some basic things like check balances and transfer funds among your accounts. You are required to enter your username and password since this is basically just another version of the Wells Fargo banking web site.

wf-im

With the Instant Messaging program on your phone you can text BAL to 93557 (WELLS) and within a few seconds you will get a text response with your account balance. You have to first set this up online with your account so that the Wells Fargo system will recognize and authorize your phone, but it only takes a couple minutes to do so. Also, you can text ACT to this number to get recent account activity, like cleared transactions and deposits to the account. This is really handy if you just need a quick view into your account without having to log in over the web.

Posted: August 25th, 2009
Filed under: Handheld, Innovation, Mobile, Tips Tags: , , | No Comments »

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