One out of five 18-35-year-olds has used their cell phone for a banking transaction – twice as many as the general population, according to a study done for IBM. Now, I’ve moved almost exclusively to online banking, but my balance transfers aren’t pressing enough that I need to do them from the middle of the street.
Most people are afraid of losing personal information, but that hasn’t stopped the almost eight million who have signed up so far. The analysts say they expect this number to grow "enormously," but I wonder if that’s more in the expectation of more robust "mobile" devices – after all, is it mobile banking when you do it from your iPhone in Safari, or an internet tablet like the Nokia n810? Is WiMax mobile? The line where people stop trusting their transmissions to be secure is getting wobbly and indistinct as net access creeps to fill all niches.
After seeing what a friend of mine could do with a packet sniffer, I’m not really down with even trying online banking away from home. Call me a luddite, but unless I move to Tokyo sometime soon, I’ll keep my money in my wallet.