Android Banking
Last days, I am hearing so much about launches of Visa’s mobile applications. Last month, again, Visa announced that they will be delivering Visa mobile applications for the Android platform. You can read about the launch here or here. During the launch there s a key sentence from Global Head of Product that I really loved. “combining two of the world’s most powerful and ubiquitous consumer innovations, electronic payments and mobile technology” These words always increase my enthusiasm about the joint of mobile & internet & payments.
The mobile services developed for Android will include, shortly, alerts against fraud, discount&loyalty offers from 3rd parties and merchants, location based services providing coordinates of merchants promoting, nearby ATMs through Google Map/Earth.
If you are wondering about Android platform developed by our biggest lovemark, GOOGLE, you can check Google’s Android 2.0 page or you can enjoy the video about how they created it as an open source project. Plus, see the applications in T-Mobile-G1 mobile phone, I guess still there are lots of people who haven’t touched it yet including me 
What I want to talk about Android is the possible opportunity for the banks. When Apple distributed i-phone in the Turkish market with Turkcell and Vodafone, TEB, Akbank and GarantiBank were the proactive ones who improved mobile banking services for iphone. Now we are not sure when we’ll be able to see Android applications in Turkey, hopefully in 2009, but still mobile service providers, telcos and banks must be creating new and useful applications for their consumers.
Especially, the location based promotion model can be used for bright ideas. Finishing this post, I recognized that I must search more about location based payment & promotion & campaign models.
ps: Unfortunately, while I was editing this post, all “blogger” based blogs were banned in Turkey ! Sometimes I really feel the irony working on these topics in a “banned” country.
