04 Oct 04

According to figures from the Bank of Korea, quoted in Business Week, 518,000 Korean used their mobile phones to complete a total of four million banking transactions during June of this year.

Every bank in Korea now offers the type of mobile banking services which have been so slow to catch on in the west. According to the central bank of Korea some 300,000 mobile customers a month are buying the specially-adapted cell-phones which can be used for mobile banking and other payment services. Within two years it is projected that the country will over 6 million regular users of mobile banking services.

Hyun Jun Yong, director of LG TeleCom's mobile banking unit, BankOn says that the services “Have a huge potential to revolutionize the use of money, and will be a stepping stone to a cashless society.” Certainly Jun Yong may be guilty of over-stating his case but already there are over 100,000 infra-red readers adapted to take payment directly from mobile phone handsets in Korea.

 Although subscribers pay only a small monthly fee to their operators for the banking service and small but regular charges on the transactions, the customers are far less likely to switch to another mobile service provider. In an attempt to cash in on the customer loyalty experienced by banks, LG and other operators are now using the bank branches themselves to offer new mobile subscription packages to would-be cellular subscribers.