WIRELESS BANKING: The Next Untethered Step

Just when you thought the PC was the last word in cutting edge delivery, out comes a brand new channel. Will banks sign up? When Bank of Montreal and its technology partner, 724 Solutions, announced a joint venture called Veev late last year, word of the project signaled yet another big shift in thinking on retail delivery, much as it had in Europe and Asia a few years before. Now, information and payments could be electronically delivered to consumers any time, anywhere. With it, banking and brokerage got a brand new channel--wireless. For anyone who has yet to read early Veev press coverage (see the sidebar on p.51), the Canadian project is designed to let bank customers bank, buy and sell stocks, and even make retail purchases, with mobile phones, palm pilots, and other hand-held devices. In simple terms, Veev lets its users retrieve or transmit data from a mobile device to a bank's server (which links to consumer' s account information)--and vice versa--via a connection supplied by a telecommunications carrier such as AT&T or Sprint to complete an array of transactions. Interest in taking wireless a step beyond chat is a global affair, and projects like Veev are being run in countries like Finland and Japan. These days, travelers to those places are apt to see a landscape of walking, talking, and increasingly, transacting customers. Use of the technology started overseas for reasons that have mostly to do with the nature of the telecommunications infrastructures in Europe and Asia, which made use of cell phones preferable to traditional models. (In addition, each had adopted a standard known as GSM for voice and data communications that made text-messaging on cell phones easy to deploy, and economical for consumers to use.) Readers of Wired magazine, for example, may recall one of last year's cover shots: a group of photogenic, Finnish youths posed for the camera with their candy-colored collection of Nokia cells. With an average age of 20, and few preconceived notions about how to bank or shop, this group was ready to work, play, and make simple payments on the Net from th eir native Finland as part of a national trial of wireless devices. Other developments point to an increasingly mobile computing population abroad. In Germany, a recently introduced service called short message service (SMS) already has about 80 million users and became popular quickly, says Ken Dulaney, vice-president of the mobile computing group, Gartner Group, San Jose, Calif. With it, users can send each other short text messages much like e-mail. While not a banking example, he posits such instant success can be had in the U.S., and can be had for just about any application--if it touches on a consumer need. Imagine the possibilties Veev made a splash here, in part, because it was launched despite a challenging telecommunications environment. It was also, arguably, a better designed solution that could eventually accommodate a greater volume of users and multiple device types. In North America, wireless banking is admittedly at its hype stage, where high hopes outweigh the rigors and reality checks associated with more general use. In fact, most banks are still in the throes of giving their customers pc, not cell phone web access. Still, the technology has struck the imagination of more than a few major bankers here, among them Bank of America and Harris Bank (the Chicago-based subsidiary of Bank of Montreal that went live with the service last fall). 724 Solutions and wireless security firm Sonera are also working on a major initiative with Citibank to deliver wireless services as part of an ambitious global program. A host of nonfinancial wireless services are also beginning to crop up in other sectors, according to John Fallen, director of technical marketing development for Baltimore Technologies, which is now working on a wireless security solution that incorporates public key infrastructure (PKI) technology. …

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