By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
A growing number of Koreans are transferring money, paying bills and carrying out other basic banking transactions via their cell phones.
MarketingInsight, a local consultancy, Friday said it surveyed 100,752 cell phone users and found that 5.3 percent of those surveyed use mobile banking, rising from 4.8 percent the previous year.
Mobile banking enables subscribers to access their bank accounts for basic banking transactions anytime and anywhere.
``We started tracking the mobile banking usage rate last year. The rate is obviously on the increase,'' MaketingInsight official Shim Si-won said.
``Koreans have advantages in using mobile banking because most handsets are linked to the Internet,'' she said.
More than 42 million of the overall 49 million population here carry cell phones with most of them connected to the Internet.
Broken down by carriers, the No. 3 player LG Telecom was found to enjoy the first-comer advantage with 13.6 percent of its clients utilizing the handset-based financial services.
The business bellwether SK Telecom came in at second with 4.4 percent followed by the runner-up KTF with 2.3 percent.
LG Telecom launched mobile banking midway through 2003 for the first time in Korea and thereafter the underdog carrier continued to take the driver's seat.
The most-cited inconvenience of mobile banking users is the chip-based format. Currently, mobile customers are required to install an integrated-circuit chip specific to a certain bank.
The hitch is that the chip is applicable to a single bank and people have to incorporate other integrated-circuit chips to use mobile banking services of other banks.
``The survey result hints that the number of mobile banking users will explode when the one-chip-for-just-one-bank problem is addressed,'' Shim said.
``To boost the mobile banking services, wireless operators need to tackle the inconvenience in cooperation with banks,'' she said.
Wireless operators vie to introduce versatile chips, in which universal services apply to all banks, but banks are reluctant to do so. They are concerned about losing hegemony to telecom carriers with the introduction of such services. Plus, they argue such universal chips may generate problems due to the high risks of financial data leakage.