Lots of Fail With CitiBank’s New Mobile Web Site

Citibank, the fifth largest U.S. bank in deposits, recently launched a mobile web site. Read more about it on the bank’s promotional page. This should be good news. Most of the other big banks launched mobile web based online banking sites a couple years ago. Citi initially chose to go with a Java app which only supported a few handsets and was further restricted to specific operator, device combinations. I can’t imagine Citi’s application gained much traction with all the … Continue reading

An Explosion of Mobile Banking Sites

Here’s another sign that the mobile web is going mainstream. I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of banks offering web based mobile banking recently. Banks are very conservative when it comes to rolling out new online services. Until recently, there were only a few banks offering any sort of mobile banking and many of those that did, like CitiBank, took the route of using downloadable applications.  Bank of America was the first major US bank to offer mobile … Continue reading

First Interstate – Mobile Banking Security Using SMS

First Interstate Bank, a regional bank with 50 locations and 100 ATMs in Montana and Wyoming, has launched a mobile banking site at firstinterstate.mobi. The bank is doing a good job of promoting the site with a prominent ad on their web home page and an extensive video tutorial. Themobile  site has ATM and branch lookups which do not require a login to use and include maps, driving directions and, for the branches, hours and click to call phone numbers. … Continue reading

ING DIRECT Mobile Banking

ING DIRECT is an internet bank with very good interest rates on insured savings and checking accounts. ING recently launched a mobile banking site which lets customers view balances and transactions and transfer funds between accounts using their mobile phones. The site works fairly well but has some issues. The first problem is that when I tried the URL that ING publishes, ingdirect.com/m, my Motorola i850 reported “Could not connect to site”. I tried it in Firefox to capture the … Continue reading

Bank of America – Mobile Banking

Here’s another sign of the fantastic growth of the mobile web. Even the big commercial banks are getting into the act. Bank of America, the largest US bank has launched a mobile site. Some small banks in this country have mobile sites but this is the first one I’ve seen from one of the big nationwide banks. Citibank’s mobile banking is a Java ME app, not a mobile web site. For mass adoption these things should be on the web … Continue reading