By Paramantapa Dasgupta
After Internet Banking, Mobile Banking or M-Banking has become the buzz word in the industry. It's a fact that Internet Banking has given a boost and has shown a successful way to consider it as a good alternative procedure against physical branch banking. Now where ever you are, you can access your bank account and you can do lot more things like checking your account balance, transfer money to some other account, pay your utility bills online and so on, just by comfortably sitting at your home or office. But, the technical disadvantage of Internet Banking is, you have to have internet connectivity and a computer. Definitely it's not a big hindrance in US or Europe or in the other developed countries, but if one considers the developing economies, then it's a genuine problem and more specifically in the tier II cities.
And here Mobile Banking comes into the picture to address the basic limitation of Internet Banking. If we only consider Asian developing countries, the availability of mobile connectivity is really huge. Where one may not find out a landline telephone or an internet connection, but still in those remote places getting mobile connectivity is not a major issue today.
So, Mobile Banking has given the traditional banking a newer look "Anywhere Banking". Now you don't need a PC or a laptop with internet connectivity, just you need your cell phone with you. Considering the Asian economy countries like China, India and Korea have seen the mobile boom in last one decade. A projected value of mobile connectivity in India shows that it will touch 180 Million subscribers by the end of 2008, where it was pegged at around 2 Million in the year 2000. In Korea, more than 70% of the entire population is carrying mobile devices.
The biggest advantage Mobile Banking provides to the banks is that it helps to cut down the costs as it's even more economic than providing tele-banking facilities