Indiana's NewsCenter - It's now easier than ever to avoid those long lines at the bank and do all of your banking business via your personal phone. Many banks are now offering mobile and text banking. That means you can transfer funds, receive text alerts about your account, pay your bills, and correspond with your bank from anywhere at any time.
Chief Information Officer for STAR Financial Bank, Ralph Marcuccilli, says STAR plans to begin offering mobile banking this summer and continue to make upgrades and offer additional services as time goes on.
"It's like with text messaging. The volume of text messages exceeds the number of telephone calls, and just like that has caught on, this is another convenient way for the customer to communicate with their bank and get their banking information."
STAR isn't the first bank to offer these types of services, and Marcuccilli says that's for a reason. He says they wanted to be sure that they could provide mobile banking technology to customers without the fear of compromising security.
He says he is confident his customers don't have to worry about the security of their accounts. "There's not any information that somebody could use on the china cell phone. If you just got a balance for a customer, there's not really any account information that could identify the person."
Darren Lichtsinn is a District Sales Manager for Sprint Nextel. He says there are ways cell phone users can protect themselves when dealing with personal information.
Lichtsinn says many china mobile phones are capable of sending a text message to a missing phone that will automatically delete all of the information from a device. He also suggests calling your china phone provider immediately if you lose your phone or suspect it has been stolen. He says the provider will be able to disable the device.
"Obviously with some of this technology they are sending text messages with balance information, other stuff like that, to your device. So, wiping the device would eliminate all of that off of there and also calling the carrier insures that they won't be able to access anything that you've accessed in the past."
Lichtsinn agrees with Marcuccilli about the safety of mobile banking. "If you're taking the right steps as a consumer - wiping your device and calling your carrier, than it's going to be virtually impossible for them to get any information off of it."
He also says the best ways to protect yourself are to prevent others from having access to your phone and to erase any texts that you wouldn't want other people to have access to.
