Mobile banking apps pose security concerns

Despite the rapidly increasing levels of smartphone use among American consumers, and the consequent opportunity to consolidate consumer loyalty in banking and other industries, mobile software used to access bank websites often does not yet meet most security standards, according to a report from American Banker.

The magazine said testing performed by Chicago-based computer security firm viaForensics had found critical security loopholes - enabling researchers to access transaction data, usernames, and passwords - in well over three quarters of the mobile banking applications tested, running on both Android-based smartphones and Apple's iPhone.

Trust is crucial for banking and virtually all other economic transactions, so such concerns will have to be addressed before wider adoption is possible, especially since the banking infrastructure in the United States is highly developed, unlike the situation in other parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

Right now, mobile banking is a "nice to have" sort of feature, while in Africa mobile often can function as the banking system itself.

Report: Mobile phone applications for banking websites still pose security concerns