Mobile Banking: Mobile banking is a
system that allows customers of a financial institution to conduct a number of
financial transactions through a mobile device such as a mobile phone or
personal digital assistant.
Mobile banking
differs to mobile payment's which involves the use of a mobile device to pay
for goods or services either at the point of sale or remotely, analogously to
the use of a debit or credit card to effect an EFTPOS payment.
The earliest
mobile banking services were offered over SMS, a service known as SMS banking.
With the introduction of smart phones with WAP support enabling the use of the
mobile web in 1999, the first European banks started to offer mobile banking on
this platform to their customers. Mobile banking has until recently (2010) most
often been performed via SMS or the mobile web.
Internet banking: Online banking (or
Internet banking or E-banking) allows customers of a financial institution to
conduct financial transactions on a secured website operated by the
institution, which can be a retail bank, virtual bank, credit union or building
society.
To access a
financial institution's online banking facility, a customer having personal
Internet access must register with the institution for the service, and set up
some password (under various names) for customer verification. The password for
online banking is normally not the same as for [telephone banking]. Financial
institutions now routinely allocate customers numbers (also under various
names), whether or not customers intend to access their online banking
facility. Customer’s numbers are normally not the same as account numbers,
because number of accounts can be linked to the one customer number. The
customer will link to the customer number any of those accounts which the
customer controls, which may be cheque, savings, loan, credit card and other
accounts. Customer numbers will also not be the same as any debit or credit
card issued by the financial institution to the customer.
To access online
banking, the customer would go to the financial institution's website, and
enter the online banking facility using the customer number and password. Some
financial institutions have set up additional security steps for access, but
there is no consistency to the approach adopted.
The common features fall broadly into
several categories
A bank customer
can perform non-transactional tasks through online banking, including -
- Viewing
account balances
- Viewing
recent transactions
- Downloading
bank statements, for example in PDF format
- Viewing
images of paid cheques
- Ordering
cheque books
- Download
periodic account statements
- Downloading
applications for M-banking, E-banking etc.
Bank customers can transact
banking tasks through online banking, including -
- Funds
transfers between the customer's linked accounts
- Paying
third parties, including bill payments (see, e.g., BPAY) and
telegraphic/wire transfers
- Investment
purchase or sale
- Loan
applications and transactions, such as repayments of enrollments
- Register
utility billers and make bill payments