Nope, you will find nothing at all if you look at US/European banks. Mobile innovation is happening elsewhere these days, and our banks are being infamously slow to catch up. However, the fact that innovation is happening elsewhere does not deny its value or the potential of the platform. Look at this East African service, for example:

http://csrdaily.csrafrica.net/.....kenya.html

Similar initiatives could help our banks better serve the scores of people who are denied credit cards on a daily basis, due to ever tougher credit policies. Sadly, our banks have opted instead for generic and badly targeted services that lack depth and focus, with adoption suffering as a result.

We keep disregarding mobile innovation coming from other regions as ‘developing countries only’ stuff. In the meantime, they push ahead, dwarfing our mobile initiatives by comparison. The current hype about contactless payments makes me smile, considering South Korea has had a national standard since 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7882229.stm) and they have pretty much forgotten about plastic credit cards (http://communities-dominate.bl.....-cash.html)

Regarding your second point, I have no idea what lies behind banking preference towards native applications, but somehow I suspect it has very little to do with perceived security which, by the way, might be misguided (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2.....kyrockets/). I could be wrong though.

Cheers

As for the mobile/native debate, that’s obviously a biggie. There is a security benefit to native, in that there’s no risk of phishing look-a-like websites that you could get with mobile web. But primarily I think it’s a psychological benefit — native may feel more secure to less savvy customers. But that’s just me guessing. Ideally banks should have a good mobile site and supplement it with native apps.

@ Stu. Yeah — for sure they used their parent company’s design, and probably a lot of the back-end as well. iTunes links to 4 other versions of this app out there (including Northern Bank up, well, North). No doubt that’s a big reason a relatively small bank in Ireland was able to launch this.

Was looking into monile banking myself and it looks like the NIB app is a spinoff of Danske Bank’s app http://www.danskebank.se/sv-se.....lbank.aspx

Agree with you on the wheel – seems pretty gimmicky to me.

One thing I noticed is that it assumes that you’re using a phone (in my case it’s an ipod touch), and only offers “call” options under contact. An email option would be a good addition.

2 critical questions for Google+ in my mind are:

a)is it sufficiently innovative for it to have a meaningly point of difference for people vs FB? The circles idea is great and is likely to become more relevant over time as FB users start to grapple with how to handle the ‘how to be friends with mum/dad/boss/etc’ issue on FB.

b)Will it hit a critical mass or ‘tipping point’ quickly enough for it to become a meaningful proposition. It will presumably hope to target internety geeky early adopters and hope to engage mass market appeal following that. Most internety types I know are quite exited about it, but I agree that some of this looks like rubbernecking.

At a hunch though, I’m not feeling it…but then again, I’m still on Bebo!