The Charge Towards Banking Via Mobile Applications

Happy Friday!  It's time to put in a day of work and then dine on the fruits of our labor.  Everybody's working for the weekend, right?  Pull some cash out of your account and take a ride on the weekend's ferris wheel.  If you bank with Citibank, you may have recently gotten confused by the numbers.  Sometimes that happens – getting confused about numbers that is, not how much cash is in your account; the latter is a scary thought.

Is that why Facebook is hesitant about mobile applications, because all of the 'bugs' aren't exterminated from systems? The New York Times ran a story, featuring Citigroup's mobile application mishap. Citi mistakenly overcharged iPad-leveraging customers (and others?); Citi has traced the error to a young, iPad application.  Other mobile applications as well as the bank's central systems were not influenced and remain secure the brand advises.

As we know, numbers can get confusing; we may be bewildered by Facebook's number of active users; we may also be confused by how many of Citi customers were actually affected.  As the Times article relays, Citi declined to release the actual number of customers influenced by the error.  Additionally, some consumers, not using an iPad device, were overcharged.

Citi spokesmen voice doing all within the bank's efforts to address the matter (that is now fixed) and reimburse all overcharged and inconvenienced consumers, consumers who are quickly getting familiar with mobile devices as these global mobile statistics reflect.

Are banks trying to keep up with the quick-footed digital times, while security and efficiency lags behind?  The Times did another story on mobile device hacking a few weeks ago; it seems hackers can get in your phone just as easily as your laptop and desktop computers.  Citi is familiar with such scenarios as well, addressing matters last summer due to a breach in its systems, where thousands of North American credit-card customers' info was 'hacked.'

Perhaps Citi did not disclose an exact number of consumers (using mobile devices and beyond) affected because it's hard to figure an exact number.  David Albertazzi advises financial institutions on tech and regulatory issues.  He states, "It's very challenging to really pinpoint the number of customers affected.  It's the nature of the beast."

That does not seem very reassuring; maybe with the Facebook IPO so brand new, the social media brand does not want to breach the mobile application topic just yet; Facebook is one of the most popular social sites; the brand is savvy to the power of mass information and the ease at which customers can voice dissatisfaction with brand-related services and products.  As one online commenter relayed, the application is "very unreliable."  Whether that remains to be true on a mass scale is yet to be seen, however in such 'social' times, brands can't afford to displease even a minutia of the masses.