Nokia sees mobile banking potential

Nokia sees a good chance for mobile financial services to become big business in coming years, and the world's top cellphone maker hopes to take a slice of the emerging market at its takeoff, reports Reuters.

Telecom operators, banks and handset makers are increasingly looking at the opportunity to find additional revenue from mobile financial services.

"This is one of the biggest opportunities out there for mobile. The potential is enormous, but it is a very complex business," said Teppo Paavola, head of Nokia's Money service.

NatWest has introduced an iPhone app allowing customers to check their account balance and manage their finances, says New Media Age.

The RBS-owned bank's free app, developed by mobile payments provider Monitise, taps into growing demand for more sophisticated banking services.

It lets customers perform balance enquiries, view a mini-statement, manage SMS alerts and top up prepaid mobile phones.

ACI Worldwide says The Nationwide Building Society has been awarded the Banking Technology Magazine Award for the 'Best use of IT in retail banking', for its use of ACI Proactive Risk Manager for fraud prevention and detection, according to CNNMoney.

Using Proactive Risk Manager, Nationwide has been able to reduce fraud levels, not only preventing losses, but also ensuring its customers were protected from the inconvenience of falling victim to fraud. Nationwide installed Proactive Risk Manager to manage transactions from ACI's Base24 product.

Alex Kwiatkowski, principal analyst, financial services technology at Datamonitor, said: "Addressing the issue of fraud is one of the key operational objectives of retail banks, and Nationwide has clearly been able to use ACI's technology to successfully achieve this goal.”