Consumers call for proactive services

Consumers who use mobile banking applications want financial institutions to provide more proactive services, according to a survey by mobile marketing firm, Sponge, reveals Computing.

Sponge surveyed 450 UK consumers via the mobile Internet in August and found that 44% of respondents already use their mobile - via Internet, apps or text -- to interact with their banks. More than one in four said they did so frequently.

The majority of respondents who do mobile banking use standard control features, such as checking their balance - around 49% said balance-checking was the most useful function.

Bellevue wireless-industry pioneer John Stanton, who co-founded the company that is now T-Mobile USA, is backing a plan with international relief agency, Mercy Corps, to create a 'mobile wallet' system that would allow Haitians to receive wages and make payments using their mobile phones, reports The Seattle Times.

Stanton is helping to bring mobile phone banking and technology internships to Haiti. He says the absence of heavy machinery amid the debris of downtown Port-au-Prince epitomises the current predicament.

Nine months after a big earthquake, tonnes of rubble still need clearing, and hundreds of thousands of people still live in makeshift tent camps, squalid conditions that provide a breeding ground for cholera.

Mobile telecoms firm, Safaricom, has deepened its foray into Kenya's financial services sector with the signing of a partnership deal that will see it tap into the high turnover retail chains business using its money transfer service, M-Pesa states Business Daily.

The deal, which will enable Safaricom's subscribers to use the M-Pesa service to buy goods from two of Kenya's leading retail chains, was signed recently, deepening the country's foray into the era of cashless transactions.

The partnership involving Uchumi Supermarkets, which is Kenya's second largest retail chain by annual turnover, and fourth placed Naivas, deepens the mobile money transfer platform's transformation into a key electronic commerce tool with the potential of upsetting the cash-based transaction system that currently dominates the country's commerce.