Glowrich on New Media

Why Rabobanks paying via mobile phone will fail at first

Rabobank just introduced transferring money via mobile phones, something which hasn’t been possible in The Netherlands, at least to my knowledge. This seems in line with Rabobank making alliances with mobile phone providers, content providers and service providers. I think it’s good that Rabobank starts to roll out new ways of paying but it seems that they haven’t really gone through a lot usability tests. Maybe the ‘perpetual beta’  has entered the impenetrable citadel of banking, who knows, but it’s more likely they think this is a proper 1.0 version.

Steps you have to take to pay

1. Open a mobile wallet
2. Transfer money from your regular account to this wallet

After this you can either buy something in a (online) shop or pay friends for that last round of beers with “just one sms” (text message). This is not true in most cases, the only way to pay via just one sms already existed and you first needed to type in your account number and password ON A WEBSITE. So that’s not mobile at all unless you use your mobile phone for surfing the web. If you’re not using your mobile phone for that, it takes 2 text messages.

1. Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of your friend, the amount of money and a personal message
2. Receive a confirmation message with a codeword
3. Reply to this message the codeword within 10 minutes

A similar procedure need to be gone through if you want to pay in a shop, although the explanation on the website is a little ambiguous about the productcode.

1. Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of the shop, the productcode of the product you want to buy.
2. You receive a confirmation message with a productdescription, the price and a codeword
3. Reply to this message the codeword (within 10 minutes?)

Although it seems quite easy, how do you type in the phonenumber of your friend? I don’t know those 10 numbers. Some (read: all) phone companies recognized this problem and implemented a contactlist about 15 years ago on all of their phones. But how do I make use of that contactlist? Most phones don’t have a cut&paste functionality.

Hassles

Ok, so you’ve found out how to pay and you’re okay to pay your mobile phone provider for the text messages on top of this. You seem to enjoy paying in this new, cool way and show it off to your friends. But what’s that, you’re maxed out? Yes indeed, you have to fill up your wallet again and again, it only able to hold 150 euro’s. Seems fine for paying friends and drinks but who actually starts using it will find out this is a ridiculous limit. You don’t want to charge every couple of days, you don’t need to do that with your normal electronic payments, so why now?
This is only a minor hassle compared to the hassle somebody on the receiving side has to go through. Imagine that you receive a text message saying that you received 10 euro’s from a phone number on your ‘mobile wallet’ of which you have never heard. Hopefully the sender put in their name in the personal message, otherwise you have to work your way down your contactlist looking for that number to know who sent you money. But who puts in their name in text messages to friends? They recognize who’s message it is because their phone tells them, so lots of people will forget to say who they are.
Now you finally know who you got the text message from you need to sign up to Rabobanks SMS mobile paying site to actually collect the money. Can I show my phone to somebody at a Rabobank and will they give me my money? I don’t think so. What happens to the money when nobody collects it isn’t clear: does Rabobank keep it, is it put back in the payers ‘mobile wallet’, is Rabobank going to look for me to give me the money somebody actually gave to me?
Rabobank has to sort out these usability issues before I start to use it, and I like to think of myself as an early adopter.