Mobile: The Next Banking Frontier

All I wanted to do this afternoon was make a £913 payment to a new payee using one of my UK banks accounts to a UK supplier. But goodness me, we - collectively as an industry - still make this type of activity difficult. Because it was a new payee.

Danger, Will Robinson.

I used my default UK bank's mobile app to add a payee and pay £250 to the supplier within about 60 seconds. That is good. Really good, fast. So far, I'm on 10 out of 10. I'm normally delighted with the service in the mobile app.

When it came to the other £613 due to the supplier... that was where the problems began. I was able to make that first £250 payment because it was at the fraud-challenge-threshold - a higher amount would automatically require proper authentication.

I was prompted by the mobile app to use 'Online Banking' if I wanted to make another payment to this new payee today. That's because I now need to go through the full kitchen-sink style authentication. I understand why - this is a key anti-fraud measure. Millions are lost by banks every month in the fight against fraud refunds and…