Mobile banking is big news in Africa – and more especially in Nigeria. The advent of GSM threw up a slew of mobile banking services, most of which ran basically on simple SMS. Send this code to a certain number to check your account balance. Send another to check last 5 transactions, and so on and so forth.
As a matter of fact, when First Atlantic Bank (now First Inland) introduced the SMS banking service years ago, I hopped on immediately, using it to power former DomainStandard hosting services (now Alireta).
First Atlantic was also revolutionary with its FlashMe Cash product, a purely SMS/mobile banking application that was a step above the regular SMS banking service. Funds transfer had never been so easy, and both account holders and non-account holders with First Atlantic could use it. All a user needed was a GSM line.
FlashMe Cash also served as a beautiful and effective payment system. DomainStandard Networks used it to full effect back then to receive payments from customers. I also remember that a java-based FlashMe Cash application was also introduced at one point in time.
A number of years down the road, Interswitch deployed its java-based mobile banking application that allows users check balance, transfer funds, purchase GSM airtime, issue instructions, etc over GPRS or SMS.
What more, Interswitch took this a step further, allowing each individual bank on its platform to brand the application. Thus, today we have the same java-based mobile application branded as SkyeMobile, Umobile, et al.
eTranzact, another payment processor has a similar application with similar functions.
Besides the above-listed mobile banking applications, are you aware of any other? For example, none of the banks with internet banking facilities that I have used have a mobile version of their online banking service. Do you know of any?
This post was written by
Mister Mobility – who has written 926 posts on Mobility blog.
Founder, Mobility blog, serial lifestyle entrepreneur, speaker, & writer. Charming, passionate, tenacious & non-conformist. Will dance! Follow him on Twitter @Mister_Mobility.
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