Jason Yetton of Westpac has predicted that banking via smartphones and tablets will outstrip PC banking within five years.
Given the exponential growth of smartphone applications and mobile websites it is not surprising that such a claim would be made.
What will be interesting to establish is how the many millions of payments made by business will be transferred to smartphone applications. Many pc based transactions will be augmented by smartphones, however whether they will be replaced by them is another matter. It is hard at this point in time to see business making many transactions via smartphones, eg bulk transfers which make up the majority of the transfers currently being made. What is more plausible are tablets taking over from traditional pcs, i.e technological transfer, and small business especially making more ad-hoc transfers via this method.
It is easy to see smartphones being used for the final authorisation of transactions, say for example being set up via MYOB and final approval being provided by a manager via their smartphone.