Celent and others continue to tout mobile banking as the next big thing. Mobile is certainly big but its not clear that Banks have figured out the mobile banking model. It cannot be simply sticking online banking into a phone.
Finextra: M-banking set to grow in Western Europe – Celent
New research from Celent predicts that adoption of mobile banking is set to increase rapidly in the major markets in Western Europe over the next two years as banks look to take advantage of improvements in technology to provide new services.
The study covered five Western European countries – Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK – and found that an average of six per cent of people over the age of 16 currently use m-banking services. Germany was found to have the lowest number of users in the study with just four per cent, while in Spain nine per cent of adults are signed up to services.
Bankwatch 
My fear with mobile banking is that it will have a similar fate to SMS Alerts. You know, those things that lots of us in the industry got excited about…
It turns out the average person didn’t really want to know about their balances ‘on the run’. After all, they can go to an ATM and check it, or they’ll do it before they leave the house on internet banking…
You’re right, people really need some icing on the cake that makes ‘Mobile Banking’ relevant to the mobile platform.
@James … I agree. My thought has been that mobile will be important for Banks that use it for things that make sense while people are mobile. These could be time sensitive or security related alerts about suspicious activity on their account, for example.
@Colin,
Yep – I found that while working in the frontline (call center and branch of a credit union) one of the better selling points of our SMS alerts service was to those at risk of going overdrawn. We could set the system to trigger a SMS when that members balance fell to a certain level – $20 for example.
Having said that, SMS alert takeup has been lacklustre.
Mobile banking needs something better… something that is of everyday use to your average person.