There are things we can today do on our mobile that one wouldn't have even imagined a decade ago! Some of such innovations have been immensely useful while others have turned out to be unnecessary propositions with no real use. One such feature that I feel fits into the latter category is Mobile Banking! Banks have somehow themselves been confused and unclear about whether they wish to actually market it aggressively or not - as a result, we see many half hearted attempts where some of them advertise it full on for a few weeks, and then have completely forgotten about it!
So lets start by what Mobile Banking really is. I have been using Mobile Banking for almost two years now. To put it simply, the bank offers you an application that you can download from their site and install on your mobile phone (if it is supported). Next, you choose a user id and password and link your mobile with your bank account - sometimes you would need it to be done by your bank, at others it can be as simple as activating it at one of their ATMs. Once done, the app basically provides you access to your bank account's basic features. In general, you would be able to get your bank balance, a mini statement of last few transactions, etc. Though this might sound exciting, I always wonder what great use is this anyway to check your bank balance on your mobile phone??
Anyhow, a better (supposedly) feature that actually could be of good use is the option to pay bills through your mobile for supported operators. This could include bills for your landline, mobile, dish tv, etc. Yes, this feature actually worked for me, but it has its own problems. Those of us using Internet banking already have this convenience of paying our bills online - what is best is that it gets credited to your account instantly. Now again the same question - so why with the mobile phone. A few months back, I paid my phone bile through the mobile banking app - maybe just for the sake of it! And whoa! What I found was that my next month's bill showed up an added late payment fees for the previous month for Rs75 as the bill I paid through my mobile had taken more than a week to credit to my account:( I had to then run after the customer care and have that late fees waved off after trying to explain to them the whole rigmarole!!
What this brings us to is that - Mobile Banking was a technology that sounded promising on the very onset. But I seriously doubt its relevance today. The basic question as we have seen remains - when it's all so easily accessible through your internet, why do you anyway want to do it on the tiny screen of your mobile? How often does it happen that one forgets to pay his bill, is in the middle of a journey and so YES - he makes true use of mobile banking. Or probably another argument regarding not all people having a computer or internet access - well, how many of such people would you actually expect to be so tech friendly so as to use mobile banking on their mobiles?
I would leave it to you to decide whether or not its a thing you would want to try!
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By: S Agrawal
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