Jun 2010 Financial News

Scotia launches into mobile internet banking

Jun 23, 2010

SCOTIABANK has announced the launch of its mobile banking platform aimed at meeting increasing consumer demand to bank on the go.

The multi-jurisdiction -- Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and Bahamas -- regional launch makes Scotia the third bank to announce the introduction of mobile banking services, joining FirstCaribbean International Bank and National Commercial Bank. The service allows customers to use their mobile phones with internet access to excecute different banking transactions.

"We have a very useful mobile banking platform which goes beyond traditional provisions of balancing queries and account information, and includes things like funds transfers, credit card payments and bill payments," Maya Johnston, Scotiabank's senior vice president, customer experience, technology innovation and projects told the Business Observer yesterday.

Johnston said Scotia's mobile banking service will operate on the same security platform as Scotia OnLine Banking which allows customers to do banking transactions via their computers, with additional security measures made for mobile phones.

"We use the SSL protocol that our online banking platform works on, but we've included some traditional functionalities designed specifically for mobile phone security -- including the fact that when you're browsing on our mobile banking service, if you are in the middle of browsing and then leave your phone somewhere, the next person who picks up your phone is not able to tab back from a browser standpoint because the information is not cached on your phone," noted Johnston. She added "That's a common problem with browser based mobile banking and we've made sure that that's not going to be an issue with our customers."

According to Johnston, Scotia had considered going the more traditional SMS-based route for mobile banking but decided to go in a different direction due to increasing local penetration of technologically advanced phones, combined with security concerns.

"One of the reasons SMS was considered was because it was felt that data plans did not have enough of a penetration in the market to really reach our customer base," revealed Johnston. "(But) when we looked at it, we decided over the last year that the penetration of phones like the IPhone and the BlackBerry, the introduction of things like 3G to the market, really set the Jamaican market and certainly the Caribbean on a new trajectory in terms of the number of people that have access to these services.

"The other thing for us is that as we looked at the SMS offering, SMS in the Clear is not a particularly secure solution - it's not encrypted and we thought that that posed security risks that we weren't comfortable with as a bank," continued Johnston. "So we took the decision, at least for the first phase, to launch our mobile banking using the internet protocols that have proven to be so secure in terms of our online banking."

Johnston said that because mobile banking is still fairly new worldwide, the adoption rate in most markets is still under 10 per cent. But with an extremely high mobile penetration (close to 100 per cent) in Jamaica, the Scotia executive believes that it will be adopted relatively faster locally.

"We do expect it to be one of the primary channels that our customers will use and we're hoping that some of our customers find that this is another tool to make their lives more convenient," she said.


Source:
Jamaica Observer
Wednesday June 23, 2010

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business/Scotia-launches-into-mobile-internet-banking_7734693