Mobile Banking: Technology Solutions and Usability
The implementation choices a bank makes once it decides to enter mobile banking from a strategic point of view focuses fundamentally on customer usability and security. In all of these decisions, it is important to remember that technology choices can condition the customer experience, the bank’s operational processes, the relative bargaining power between bank and mobile operator, and service interoperability.
Technical Decision #1: Wireless bearer
The wireless bearer is the communications channel that is used to transmit data to and from the mobile terminal over the air. The choice of bearer channel is important because it affects the speed, the reliability, the cost and the security of the mobile banking application.
Technical Decision #2: Encryption standards
Adequately protecting the data on the transmission channel is essential both to provide for the necessary customer trust and to limit the potential liability to the bank.
Technical Decision #3: Application environment
The application environment is the software platform that controls how the service is presented to the user’s handset and the interactions between the user and the bank’s server. The choice of the application environment affects the user interface, the speed of service, the ease of set up and the ease of upgrading.
The main types of mobile banking implementations in the market today are summarized in the table below:
STK-based applications are the most common because they are supported by most handsets. The menu is embedded in the normal phone user interface and offers a high level of security with SIM-based encryption.
USSD is also widely used because it is not SIM-dependent, allowing it to work across all operators. Rather than finding the menu on the phone, the customer calls up the service menu by dialing a USSD short code; from then on, the customer merely responds to the information requests contained in successive USSD messages.
The single-command approach can have the user dial either a voice call or a USSD message to a short code and append transaction details as if they were supplementary dialing information.
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