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SMS Banking, convenience or privacy concern?

Announcement posted by SafeBox Solutions Ltd. 25 May 2010

A new mobile app to make SMS banking private

The use of SMS is growing fast in the financial sectors. Over the past few years, several leading banks and credit card institutions around the world have launched mobile services to allow their customers to perform balance checks, view account transactions and make payments using their mobile phone. The introduction of mobile banking either via mobile Internet or via SMS is a response to an increasing demand from customers for a safe and easy way to control their account information while they are "on the go."


However, the security and privacy of SMS is on top of the list of concerns for most customers and the banks are currently struggling to address these concerns in their current SMS banking offering.


A new mobile application, called SafeBox, has been launched by an Irish software company to allow mobile users to send and receive private and encrypted SMS, within a list of selected private contacts, inside of a private area of their mobile phone. This private area is protected by a personal PIN to prevent access in the event that the phone is lost, stolen or simply ends up in the wrong hands for a while.


The SMS and contact information stored in the SafeBox application are not visible anywhere else in the phone and do not appear in the normal SMS or phonebook folders.


“Up until now, ourSafeBox app has been mainly used in the consumer markets, where people want to communicate by SMS privately, and this market is proving very successful for us worldwide, but we are now planning to also target specifically banks and financial institutions with a customised version of our SafeBox application.” says Philippe Joly, CEO and co-founder, Safebox Ltd.


SafeBox is addressing the lack of encryption in traditional SMS messages, which is inherent to the SMS banking channel, by introducing advanced encryption inside of its application.


The company is proposing its SafeBox mobile application as an add-on to the banks' existing SMS banking service with a simple plug-and-play architecture and a set of APIs that will allow banks to roll out the white-labelled or co-branded application very quickly and at minimal cost.


The application has been developed for Java and Symbian phones initially, because of their large market share worldwide, to enable the vast majority of mobile users to benefit from the SafeBox privacy application.


The company is announcing the release of a BlackBerry and Android version shortly to offer the widest coverage possible for its private SMS application.


A number of trials are currently under discussion in selected territories and the company is confident that those trials will convert into full implementations rapidly thanks to the low level of effort to implement SafeBox into any existing SMS banking solution.


Visit www.safebox.mobi for more information.