In the past, financial services on the World Wide Web were available only to PC users. Not anymore. Two familiar devices—the mobile phone and the TV set—will greatly expand the market for the electronic delivery of personal financial services. Mobile data communication is already extending the Internet to people on the move; interactive TV could bring it to those who can’t afford to have a PC at home. Financial-services providers keen to compete on the Web need to understand how these two new routes into it may evolve.

Banking on the move

Consumers like the flexibility a mobile device can deliver: for example, access to their money anytime, anywhere; instant notification of movements in a given company’s share price; and the ability to transfer money into a bank account and to shop on the go.

Not surprisingly, financial institutions are scrambling to develop mobile-banking services using the two main technical standards currently available: the Short Message Service (SMS), a simple but effective standard for brief text messages, and the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), a more recently developed standard providing access to the Web, though in a less elaborate form than PCs do (see sidebar, "Wireless protocols"). Most...