Wireless banking transactions - account balance, funds transfer, bill payment from a smart phone or handheld PDA ATMs wirelessly connected to handheld devices through Bluetooth - See NCR news item - search for "Bluetooth and ATM" Stock Trading Sales professional automation in the financial industry - enabling these professionals to respond to customer queries on the spot Credit card authorization on mobile POS terminals equipped with wireless adapters Wireless e-mail, instant messaging

Details...
Many banking industry customers are developing wireless applications to improve bottom-line costs. Even the big banks are realizing that their sales people must leave their offices to sell directly to customers.

Apart from operational applications, such as checking your bank balance while away from home and paying bills before the due date, several banks and card processing service bureaus have started supporting credit card authorization POS terminals equipped with wireless adapters. This provides a level of mobility to retailers in setting up terminals in garden centers and similar side-walk sale scenarios. Wireless POS vendors have started offering credit card authorization devices for collecting payments for pizza delivery and similar applications.

Factors & Considerations in Wireless Banking

• Security issues complicated by different wireless network protocol
• Lack of both reality and perception of end-to-end authentication - WAP GAP describes lack of security between WAP gateway and application server. 
• Slow wireless internet connection speeds
• Lack of standards and variation among multitude of devices available to consumers
• Small screen size to display meaningful data for account details 
• Difficulty of information input

Major Vendors In This Vertical Market
724 Solutions, IBM, EDS, w-Trade, SensCom, Everypath, Air2Web, Semotus, SmartServe

Early Adopters
Bank of Montreal, Harris Bank, Bank of America, City Bank, Wells-Fargo Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Charles Schwab, e-Trade.  However, industry was mostly in pilot state with limited offering in selected areas and selected devices as of mid 2001. 

More Case Study Information on Wireless Banking, Bill Payment & Stock Trading

Business Case Justification - quite strong as compared to teller transactions - as good as Internet transactions - most handheld device costs and wireless network costs are borne by the end user.  It offers superior service to high-income mobile customers. Go to our Business case pages.

Future of Wireless Banking - a well-written paper by Rod Ghani of IBM Pervasive Computing Global services, provides a Technology Architecture showing functional decomposition of various software components that comprise an end-to-end solution. While the paper shows conceptual framework using IBM's WebSphere as an example, it can be easily generalized by replacing similar web application server components from other vendors.