To be honest, the days are long gone when you had to wait in a long line outside the bank just to access some basic banking services. Why? Well, nowadays, everything is digital, and sure enough, banking has gone digital too, at full pace actually. Like, these days, you don’t even need to visit a bank if you just want to do some basic stuff like sending money to someone, checking your bank balance, paying bills, connecting with bank people, etc. Then what? Well, since now we have something called “mobile banking,” which has made things a whole lot easier. For those who don’t know, mobile banking is a service offered by banks and financial institutions to let you use a lot of banking services through your mobile devices. Today, though, we’ll be closely looking at the mobile banking advantages and disadvantages to give you a full picture view on things. So, here we go then.
Advantages of Mobile Banking
1. You Can Bank Anytime, Anywhere
You know how using mobile banking feels like? It’s like you’re carrying a bank in your pocket; that’s how it feels like these days. Literally, you can use all the basic banking services from the device sitting pretty in your pocket (smartphone), whenever you want and from wherever you want. That’s just the biggest plus of mobile banking right there, and you can’t even argue that it is not the most important thing when it comes to using basic banking services on a day-to-day basis.
2. Sending Money Is Super Easy
Back in the old days, you’d have to wait in a long line at the bank, fill up the form/slip, and then you’d be able to deposit money to someone else’s account. That’s a lot of work right there, and mobile banking has cut down on it. How? Well, nowadays, you can just pick up your smartphone, open up your bank’s app (or even a third party one), and just send money to your known people right away, and that is like in an instant.
3. Helps You Save Money Without Thinking Too Hard
Save you money? How? Well, with mobile banking, this feature has kinda become a default one that when you spend some money let’s say ₹93 or $0.97, your mobile banking app will round it off with ₹100 or $1, and you’ll not only be able to save a lot of money in the long run this way, but you’ll be able to earn interest on it too.
4. It’s Actually Pretty Safe
Well, about safety, there is kinda a mixed reaction for different reasons. See, we’ll come to the negative parts later, but for now, just know that in comparison to the traditional way of banking, mobile banking is super safe. Usually, banking apps are built with a lot of safety features like fingerprint lock, face lock, encryption, secret codes, and stuff like that, which are pretty hard to break through.
5. Keeps Track of Where Your Money Goes
Tracking your spending is another great feature of mobile banking like, you’d have the data right there on your mobile phone for you to access whenever you want. Like, just a few clicks and you’ll know exactly where you spent carelessly, and that’ll be super helpful in letting you plan things financially for the next month.
6. Makes Banking Feel More YOU
With the advanced mobile banking apps these days, mainly from the popular and big banks today, you can customize your experience with these apps to a large extent actually. Like, you can set up reminders, create financial goals, customize the layout on the home screen, and things like that.
7. Brings Banking to More People
Since banking has literally become so easy and accessible for so many people these days, you can give the credit for that to mobile banking as well. There are so many people who just open a bank account, link everything to their mobile banking app, and then they do not visit the physical bank branch very often. This is the convenience factor that has helped a lot of people stay connected with banking all the time.
Disadvantages of Mobile Banking
1. No Internet = No Banking
Well, it should be pretty obvious that because mobile banking is super dependent upon the internet, when there is no internet, there is no mobile banking as well. And it is not very rare that you experience something like that.
2. It’s Not Always Foolproof (Hackers Exist)
Oh, hackers aka cyber criminals, are always on the lookout for people who’re not too careful with their passwords and the way they handle their digital personal data. If you’re someone like that, well, don’t be surprised when a hacker just wipes off all your hard-earned money from your account in an instant.
3. Some People Just Don’t Get It
You can’t do anything about this one though, you see, there will always be some people who aren’t too familiar with the technology that exists right now, and that’s why mobile banking will be just a useless thing to them.
4. You Miss Talking to a Real Human
Sure, there are a lot of good things about mobile banking, but when you’re facing some issue with your bank account or any banking service out there, you’d wish that you could talk to bank people face-to-face. And this human interaction is actually missing from the mobile banking scene like; you only have call and texting options, and that’s it.
5. Too Many Updates, Too Many Glitches
Sometimes (and this is only the case with a few banks out there) it all becomes too annoying for you when you see that the bank is trying to push new offers and deals all the time, NONSTOP. On top of that, glitches and bugs are real things with these mobile banking apps, which can also make you super frustrated at times.
Conclusion
As you just saw, it is mostly a positive experience with mobile banking, and if you can just avoid the challenges or know how to deal with them, then sure enough, it is one of the best ways of accessing traditional banking services without even going anywhere. That’s the best bit about it all.
