With the release of the iPhone 3G, movement on affordable mobile dataplans and a myriad of new entrants in mobile applications, it is interesting to look at perceptions around mobile data.
An interesting research piece from Unisys brings up the following statistics;
worldwide there are 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers
71% of survey respondents (surveyed in 14 countries) would not consider using a mobile device to shop or bank
59% do not trust their mobile devices to provide a secure transaction
Only 9% currently use their devices to process secure transactions
Overall what is interesting is that less than 10% of respondents trust a telecom provider to provide a secure transaction, but instead overwhelmingly favour banks to provide this functionality in a robust manner.
Clearly there is some advice that comes from all of this - Telco’s who want to be in this space should look at forming partnerships with trusted providers where the Telco provides the back-end technology but the trusted provider (ie bank) is the clearinghouse for the transaction.
Or will people’s fears about security reduce given time and increasing exposure to a mobile world?
An excellent post over on Geekzone about a customer experience with a bank. Seems that the bank contacted their customer by phone in order to make some changes to their account. Said customer was asked to verify their identity by password but when he rightly pointed out to the bank that he had no way of knowing if the person from the bank itself was legitimate - the bank officer was somewhat stumped.
I’ve always been a little laissez faire when it comes to banking and security, kind of having (blind and unwarranted) faith in those venerable banking institutions. I’m not sure why this is, bank lending is unsecured and banks are just another business, albeit one with some regulation lording over them. I have a friend that has spent years doing contract IT work within banks in the UK, she laughed when I told her about my hands off attitude and recounted the number of times she’s seen unencrypted customer username and password information passed around behind the bank’s firewalls.
Sure Internet banking is protected at length by encryption and SSL, but do we know what happens within the banks own systems? Bank tellers often get caught out stealing from the bank, what’s to stop a dodgy bank IT staffer from mining some user information.
SaaS providers talk often about the fact that customer data and customer authentication is separated on their system and within their organisation, thus ensuring that one individual within the SaaS organisation doesn’t have access to a users data - I wonder why we don’t demand the same level of security from our banks?
It seems in New Zealand that we’re quick to admonish corporates that run high profits and seemingly provide bad service. The excoriation that has been levelled on our telcos of late has been a good example of this.
One cannot help but think that much of this criticism is politically motivated (it is after all an election year - and headlines of “foreign owned corporate milks massive profits and provides dodgy service” really get grey-power all fired up and give Winston Peters a few more votes).
Why then the total silence around the super normal profits, offshore ownership and almost total lack of service that we get from our banks? Recent profit reports have been pretty fat but the conspiracists among the political parties have remained silent about them - I wonder why?
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