Mobile banking may be here, but is anyone using it?

The push to put mobile banking square in the hands of cellphone users appears to have taken a major step forward with handset giant Nokia announcing a $70 million investment in service provider Obopay, as reported by the Financial Times. This is also on top of the $69 million chipmaker Qualcomm has invested in the company last year.

But will you actually use it?


The Silicon Valley start-up charges 25 cents for every $1,000 sent and allows users who sign up for the service to send money to any text-enabled cellphone, which is pretty much every mobile device out there. Banks in the UAE including NBAD and Dubai Bank already offer such a program for their customers.

But a major question remains - does anyone actually use their cellphone to pay their bills? Noted blogger Om Malik says he has yet to see anyone using Obopay's service and though it's not a truly scientific survey, I haven't really heard anyone loudly extolling the virtues of paying for dinner by mashing their flip phone.

My guess is that while the service could work on many of today's devices, using a cellphone with a non-QWERtY keyboard to pinpoint where you want to send your cash will frustrate enough potential customers to give up before they even try. It's a chicken-or-egg argument, but the technology's mainstream breakthrough will only happen once people have enough iPhones, BlackBerrys or insert-smartphone-platform-here in the hands and a easy-to-use application developed will we begin to see mobile banking see hockey stick adoption.

What are your thoughts? Have you used online banking yet? What would need to happen to convince you to use the service? Use the comments below to voice your opinion.