Banking On The Go

A growing number of Americans are using their cell phones as pocket-sized bank tellers.

Ryan Barry, an attorney from Manchester, often does his banking during downtime at court. While waiting for a pre- trial hearing or standing in line at the clerk’s office, he checks his account balances, transfers funds and even pays his bills.

“Banks can’t be open 24 hours a day, so this type of service is a lot more convenient,” he said.

Barry, 36, gets his service through Rockville Bank, one of the first community banks in Connecticut to offer the mobile option.

It’s a measure of the growing appeal of cell phone banking that smaller banks are beginning to offer; it’s a service that larger national banks have offered for a year or more.

Bank of America, for example, unveiled its mobile banking last spring and now claims more than 1.2 million of its customers nationwide use it.

“It’s become wildly popular,” said Tara Burke, a spokesperson for the bank. “It far surpassed our expectations. People are constantly on the go, so this type of service is in demand.”

On average, customers use their mobile banking eight times a month, Burke explained. Eight percent of those customers are new to the bank. Two-thirds of them are under the age of 35, while four-fifths are under the age of 45.

To use mobile banking, a customer must have an online bank account as well as a cell phone that can support Internet access.

Most services allow customers to access their account balances, pay bills, transfer funds and locate the nearest ATM.

Text Messaging

Once customers set up an account, they use text-messaging to conduct a transaction.

Most banks don’t charge customers that use it, but the wireless carrier’s standard text messaging fees do apply.

Since June, nearly 200 Rockville Bank customers started using the bank’s mobile banking service. Bank officials expect that number to grow rapidly once the bank launches its marketing campaign over the next few months, said Bill McGurk, president and CEO of the bank.

“This is the wave of the future,” McGurk said. “It’s all about offering what people want.”

Rockville Bank made its service available to employees in June.

Other community banks, including Farmington Savings Bank, Liberty Bank and The Connecticut Bank and Trust, are likely to follow suit.

“We are definitely looking into it,” said John Patrick, CEO of Farmington Savings Bank.

Patrick said mobile banking is one of the fastest growing areas of banking today, thanks to rapid advances in technology.

Since people are using their cell phones for just about everything, this is a logical step, Patrick said.

Banks that are slow to adopt the technology are likely to fall behind their competitors in attracting younger customers, McGurk said. “There is always competition among banks to bring in younger depositors,” McGurk said. “This is one way we are looking to do it.”

As with the introduction of most new forms of online technology, security is an issue. Unisys, a technology services company, commissioned a survey of more than 13,000 consumers and found that 71 percent of those asked would not consider using a mobile device to bank or shop, mainly because of security concerns.

Banks have responded to those fears.

To bolster security Bank of America, for example, uses SiteKey, which requires customers to answer a challenge question before gaining access to their account online.

The bank also promises not to transmit account number information in any of the text messages exchanged with a customer, an important safeguard in case a cell phone is lost.

Banks are also encrypting transaction data sent from a cell phone.

But security concerns don’t appear to be discouraging Barry from using the service.

“It’s been seven months now, and I can’t stop using it,” he said.