Bank of America - What Benefits Does Mobile Banking Provide to Consumers? Why Haven't More Many Consumers Adopted Mobile Banking Yet?

1. What benefits does mobile banking provide to consumers? Why haven't more many consumers adopted mobile banking yet?

According to research, 12 million people used mobile banking services in 2009, according to Frost & Sullivan, a research firm. That number will climb to 45 million by 2014. Mobile banking offers many advantages, such as good security, easy access and plentiful applications for smart phones. The biggest benefit is that you have more control of your money. You knew where you stood at any moment. For example, you can be sitting on an airport tarmac checking your account balance or looking at recent transactions. Mobile banking isn't as fully functional as online banking. By mobile banking through you can do every day, such as looking at account activity and paying bills. It's best for alerts, especially when your account is low. The first benefit the mobile banking offers is that you can use the bank service at any time. When you are traveling, you may not have access to a bank of ATM machine. However, if you have a cell phone, you may be able to set up mobile access for your bank account so that you can check your balance and transfer funds while on the road.

Account security is another key benefit for mobile banking. While you are making transactions in business trip, you can also check your bank account on your cell phone for unauthorized transactions. To avoid that when you are getting home from a long trip, you discover that may have been a victim of fraud.

Paying bills are the third feature of benefit. In current working environment, people are busy at work during the weekday, and therefore they may not have chance to handle their bills. Mobile banking offers a platform to access your bank account to pay your bills, such as utilities, credit card payments, and auto insurance.

The last feature of benefit is that mobile banking offer complete security. People may wonder that what if cell phone is lost or have been stolen, the mobile banking will not as attractive as it should be. Thus, mobile banking encrypts your information, and adds more security on your account, which the service must be set up from a computer. Moreover, the phone can only store limited personal banking information, in case the phone is lost or stolen.

Even though mobile banking offers so many conveniences, many consumers still do not see the need for mobile banking, and many of them also are skeptical about the level of security around banking with their phone. Among users of mobile phones who have not yet adopted mobile banking, about half said that they were concerned about the security, the survey from Fed Reserve found.

Another major concern is compatibility. Mobile banking is not available on every device at the period of 2010. Some banks do not provide mobile banking at all. Others require you to use a specific mobile banking application which only available on the most popular smart phone, such as iPhone and Blackberry. If you do not own a smart phone, the types of mobile banking you can do are usually limited. Checking bank account balances via text message is not a problem, but more advanced features such as account transfers are generally not available to those phones which are not smart phone. Thus, part of reasons is that customers have not adopted yet are because the mobile banking did not promote the security properly and some devices that cannot support mobile banking software.

2. What is Bank of America's motivation to offer mobile banking to its customers? What are the associated costs and risks to the bank?

The motivation for Bank of America's is that it foreseen that the smart phone will become popular in the following years. With more cell phone companies launch their smart phone, the more platforms are available for Bank of America's mobile banking software. Therefore, Bank of America was considering investing into the mobile banking industry. Besides more platforms will be available, Bank of America also can cut the cost through increasing its mobile service. Mobile services as well as ATM transactions should eventually cost less than handling transactions within a branch. Moreover, by ramping up the relationship with customers and put people more in control of their money. This will eventually increases loyalty and engagement. As a result, the relationship with customers will become stronger, and new customers will be likely to join Bank of America because of its complete service.

The associate costs and risks would be the security for mobile banking. Similar to the threats we see in the traditional online banking, such as phishing attacks and spyware, while other threats would be thieves getting hold of a customer's device. While the world is moving faster than bank's and financial services firm's security department can keep up, bank has to consistently invest a huge amount of money to make sure the mobile banking security, and sometimes the efforts may not work out. Since there are still a number of security and fraud detection capabilities that do not exist in mobile devices in the period of 2010, the flaw of security system for mobile banking will still be an issue for Bank of America.

3. What lessons can the bank learn from its online banking operations? What are the costs and benefits of having customers migrate to online banking?

The first lesson the bank can learn and improve is its security issues. While making online payments or transferring money from on account to another, the online banker are always concerned about the hackers and anti-social elements. Hacking enables the unethical hacker to penetrate the accounts of online bankers, and spend their money. Countless online