CNN: Almost a million Koreans bank by cellphone
By Marc Perton 
posted Apr 5th 2005 4:34AM
posted Apr 5th 2005 4:34AM
Almost a million Koreans now do their banking via 3G cellphones, according to CNN. The service was first offered by Koomkin, South Korea's largest bank, about two years ago, and now all of the country's major banks offer mobile banking services. We hope the banks also offer a zero-liability policy if your phone gets lifted; according to CNN, transactions can be enabled via one button, bypassing a login screen.
I live in Korea and Korea is a nice place where some things just work.. too bad I'll be leaving in a few months to England.
Why do they use SIM cards in the UK?!?
If your phone gets lost in Korea it's easily trackable and you can get it back if someone uses it.
I also resided in Korea for sometime, yes, the competition between larger companies just make things work. It just doesn't work, it also works after a huge upgrade. I guess almost every IT company now uses Korea as their testing ground because the market boom in Korea is just tremendous.
But we all know what this means. Consumer demand is higher, and waste of money as today's gadgets are all disposable. A national disaster as Korean economy often suggests.]
They need to broaden their markets with successful products. Not just rid of it and bring a new one into Korea. Send out successful products/technology to overseas where it will actually work because it has proven so.
What is wrong with america? I don't even have a color screen on my phone, and these people are doing there banking? i did get the free phone... but still... my area just got digital service a year ago!
http://www.thetspot.org
"What is wrong with america? I don't even have a color screen on my phone, and these people are doing there banking?"
Land area --
South Korea - 98,730 sq km (38,120 sq miles)
United States - 9,158,918 sq km (3,536,278 sq miles)
You could fit 92 3/4 South Koreas into the US and have room left over. You can fit a little over 24 1/4 Japans (376,520 sq km), a bit over 26 Germanys ( 349,520 sq km), or almost 38 UKs (241,600 sq km) into the US.
Population --
United States - ~ 289,000,000
South Korea - ~ 46,852,300
What's 'wrong' with America is that we have a bit over 92 times the land mass of South Korea and a bit over six times the population. A very large and comparatively sparsely populated country is a lot harder to create infrastructure for than a comparatively small and densely populated country.
The land-mass/population density/infrastructure argument only holds water insofar as the cost/risk/investment required to roll out 3G in the US is much higher to achieve the same level of coverage as South Korea.
While this is a huge hurdle, I'm not convinced that infrastructure development will be all that's needed to popularize mobile phone banking or other such services in the US.
Peter --
'Much higher' is a tad bit of an understatement. Almost two orders of magnitude more area, just over half an order of magnitude in population. The difference in size and population density is mind boggling and certainly large enough to make any comparisons pretty much meaningless.
I agree that differential is perhaps not all of the answer, but it's a pretty big part of it. There's also a big question in my mind as to whether very many Americans want services like banking from their cell phone. I can't for the life of me even figure out what might be meant by the term. Presumably you can neither deposit a check nor withdraw cash using just your cell phone, those two items plus checking your balance are 99.99% of what banking most people do.
I doubt most Americans are even particularly interested in most of the features they can get from their cell company now, I seriously doubt there's much demand or interest in being able to bank from your phone, whatever exactly might be meant by that.
well, the technology in USA is a slightly different than in other places. Mobile phone advances and technology indeed is "slower", compared to other countries in Asia, or in Japan/Korea. For instance, when cellphone users in Asia are onto megapixel imaging in their phones, cellphones in USA are only starting to get coloured screens. it's the market trend and the direction in which the market is headed towards, and cell users mindsets and context.
however, in the area of defense tech, internet, etc., USA is pretty advanced.
I guess it really just depends.