Mobile banking gets youth's vote

Mobile banking has not yet become the most popular way to manage money. But banks can't blame their young customers for that, according to an Auriemma Consulting Group report, writes MyBankTracker.

Offers of incentives tied to on-the-go money management led 40% of mobile bankers aged 18 to 45 to subscribe to the service. With most customers aged 45-plus not using mobile banking, the total segment of the market currently adopting mobile banking is still small.

Just 13% of customers currently use their mobile devices to bank. However, the report did point out that young peoples' adoption of mobile banking could pay off when those customers grow older and begin to make more advanced financial moves.

At the Finovate conference in San Francisco last week, technology provider Fiserv showcased a prototype of its online banking and payment application for Apple's iPad, says InformationWeek.

It included a preview of ZashPay, a person-to-person payments service coming in the US summer. Erich Litch, Fiserv SVP and GM of consumer services, says the iPad app is a "rich online banking experience with personal financial management tools, budgeting, goals, online payments, messages, managing personal payments, transfers and self-service".

Instead of the multi-layered approach of a Web site containing perhaps 100 different hierarchically organised pages, the iPad app compresses the entire online banking experience to a single, easy-to-navigate layer, explains Litch.

China's third-party payment industry has been around for more than a decade, but nearly half of that period has been shadowed by unfinished plans to regulate the sector, according to Market Watch.

Most of today's more than 300 players are private enterprises, and collectively, they deal with tens of millions businesses and individuals every year. E-commerce has been growing fast, a truth accented by the expanding international arena for the Alipay service of B2B giant Alibaba.

Despite the sector's size and growth, however, the government has delayed finalising formal regulations. The page may turn soon, but that hasn't settled concern that smaller companies may lose out to industry giants. Payment companies across the country are waiting to see how the changes may affect their bottom lines.