Security fears wrecking trust in mobile finance, survey finds
Smartphones not wallets
By John E Dunn | Techworld | Published: 18:58, 06 August 2012
A spot survey of UK smartphone users has uncovered a cool attitude to mobile banking with security worries cited as the main reason for users’ reluctance.
Using a reasonable sample of 2,148 adults, YouGov found that 80 percent either didn’t or barely used mobiles for banking or financial transactions, with 58 percent seeing themselves unlikely to use a mobile as a wallet even if that feature was made available.
More than half cited security concerns as the primary reason, ahead of the 35 percent who found smartphoen screens too small to use and the 20 percent who believed the online security checks were a major inconvenience.
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Underlining the work the industry has to do, a further ten percent were unimpressed by the quality of the mobile banking apps they had encountered.
“Customers still have a lack of trust in mobile banking security which banks need to overcome by providing reassurance of security while at the same time making security procedures intuitive and easy to use,” commented Iain Regan of Firstsource Solutions, whose company sponsored the survey.
“This is quite a challenge that will need banks, software developers, security experts, as well as customer service specialists to collaborate in order to convince their customers to adopt mobile banking services,” he said.
On a positive note, younger users tended to be more receptive, with 42 of 18-24 year olds saying they would be willing to use their mobile as a credit card if able to. Again, however, the majority who were less keen cited security as their worry.
For this reason, half of respondents would be willing to load up their phones with a barely-usable £5.
The short-term losers from all this could be the companies that have invested in mobile wallet technology, including Apple, Mastercard and Visa as well as the multitude of smaller vendors supplying different elements of the technology chain. Mobile networks also want to get in on the business. The banks, meanwhile, almost seem to see mobile banking as an encumbrance.
Comments
Mike_Acker said: a maleable device is unsuitable for commercial applications which require security this is an attitude adjustment that the industry is going to have to acceptno over the air programmingto update the device replace itthis is easy to do where the device is a read-only CD eg LinuxLive cd or a smart card that can be flashed and closedthis will help stop attackers from getting into the customers endpointto stop the attackers from stealing account numbers from merchant systems is harder and will require another ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENTPCI is simple automation of a paper based system And atotal dinosauerif you give your card number to the merchant it can bestolen and the more merchants you give your card number tothe higher the probabilityas Bruce Schneier has pointed out to us though there will beno progress in security until there is product liabilityExisting Point of Sale Terminals POST and mag-stripe cardsmust all be scrappedInstead smart cards with PGP should be usedOn a transaction you DO NOT give your account number to themerchant the merchant submits his invoice to your SmartCard via near field radioyour smartcard then will encrypt the invoice for yourPayment Card Service not the merchant together withauthorization for payment and forward this back to themerchants POSTthe POST cannot read the authorization it is encrypted tothe payment processing service The POST must forward thecipher text to the payment processoron approval the payment processor will forward the paidinvoice to the POST and the EFT to the merchant The POSTprints your receipt and you are good to gojust like cash the merchant never knows who you are onlythat you paid yea