CommBank: 'determined' to make mobile banking better

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 12 July 2011 12:53

Your IT - Mobility

When you live in 'bank world' and want to make life easier for everyone else that doesn't, you need to do what the Commonwealth Bank is doing: enabling real-time mobile banking on any device, any time and virtually anywhere.

Although the Commonwealth Bank has today announced some great leaps forward in mobile banking, with a new Android tablet app to join its iPad app, a new Windows Phone 7 app and even an HTML5-delivered banking site for BlackBerry Playbook users, there was surprisingly no mention of actual mobile banking security.

Yes, there is the Commonwealth Bank's guarantee that NetBank transactions will be safe from (or reimbursed after) any fraudulent activity, which has been in place since CommBank first brought its NetBank service to light in the late 90s as the popularity of the Internet first took off.

However, if we fast forward to today, there's not only more mobile phones in Australia than there are people, but tablets (and smartphones) have emerged as incredibly popular mobile computing platforms.

Thus there is a stark need for banks to ensure end-users that not only are there guarantees in place to reimburse fraud, but that there are incredibly strict measures in place to secure mobile banking users to actually prevent as much mobile banking fraud as possible, instead of just cleaning up after the fact.

One way to secure mobile devices is to use 'page and device fingerprinting' technologies to determine the security health status of the smartphones, tablets and other computing devices before and end-user has even logged in, and while CommBank wouldn't explain whose page and device fingerprinting technologies it used, if any, it did seek to assure journalists present at this morning's launch that it took security very seriously (and didn't want to give criminals a heads-up on what security technologies it was using).

Of course, having seen TrustDefender's technologies in action, an Australian company whose technology enables banks and, frankly, any organisation, to take advantage of the ability to scan an end-user's computing device in real time before an end-user has even entered in any usernames, passwords or other multi-factor authentication systems, (through page and device fingerprinting technologies, among others), I can only wonder why the UK's Tesco Bank, which is bigger than CommBank, launched with TrustDefender from day one a couple of months ago, yet CommBank seems, surprisingly, to have never heard of it.

That said, the CommBank is very well aware of it now (following my questions) so we'll just have to see whether Australia's biggest bank is willing to partner with the world's most progressive and advanced banking security company (TrustDefender) to make its massive mobile banking initiatives the most secure on the planet.

So, after all of that - what about the CommBank's actual new mobile initiatives?

What are they and which mobile platforms does it cover?

Continued on page two, please read on.