The Commonwealth Bank has made a strong play for leadership in mobile banking - a market of rapidly increasing importance - with the launch of a new NetBank app for iPad and Android tablets and a new mobile banking app for iPhone, Android and Windows 7.

St George Bank has launched new mobile banking apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 smartphones, saying they offer faster and simpler access to its mobile banking services than the current apps.

Australia’s “which bank” is bringing its mobile NetBank service to Android OS smartphones from Monday the 28th of Feb, two years after the iPhone NetBank service first launched.

ANZ Bank today officially launched its goMoney iPhone application that allows ANZ customers to monitor and manage their money, and send a payment to any mobile phone. It also hinted that an Android version might not be far behind.

VeriSign has today made available to Australian mobile users a free mobile application that it claims can transform more than 200 different types of mobile phones and devices into identity protection authentication credentials and a one-time password generator.

The global financial crisis continues to reverberate around the world but in Australia, at least, one business sector - the ever changing telecommunications industry – is experiencing rapidly increasing consumption of non-voice/text services, including multimedia, content, information and entertainment services by consumers as mobile phone usage matures.  

Nokia has announced plans to launch a service that will enable cellphone users to access basic financial services such as sending money to another person just by using that person's mobile phone number, paying bills, paying for goods and services and recharging prepaid SIM cards.

Mobile broadband usage has surged over the past year, with subscribers to the services nearing a quarter of a billion globally and the industry recording year-on-year growth of 93 percent.

Western Union has selected Sybase mobile messaging and commerce subsidiary, Sybase 365, as a provider to its mobile money transfer services.

A new partnership between Visa - operator of the world's largest retail electronic payments network - and NeuStar, a global provider or interconnection services to mobile operators, promises to give the nascent mobile payments industry a major boost.