The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has this morning revealed its new mobile app, dubbed Kaching, that will allow owners of Apple’s iPhone to pay friends and bills on their phone.
Kaching (Credit: Commonwealth Bank)
Placing an emphasis on the bank’s 24×7 real-time platform that allows it to inform customers of transactions immediately, the CBA says it’s new ‘Kaching’ app expected to launch soon, will allow it to take mobile banking into a whole new era.
The bank says the app will “revolutionize” mobile banking in Australia, providing capabilities including the ability to pay Facebook friends on the go, and bills on your phone.
It has been designed “entirely” for the iPhone, with attention paid to every detail analysed and checked for performance. It’s also integrated with iPhone features, including GPS.
Peer-to-peer payments also feature in the app, with the CBA adding a new tool to pay friends mobile to mobile using the iPhone’s address book as well as the ability to pay friends with an email containing payment instructions. If the person is a CBA customer and has used Kaching before, the transaction will occur in real-time – no other interactions are needed.
Facebook is also another option to pay your friends – Commonwealth Bank will support payments from mobile phones to the social network.
In a major movement towards mobile support of Near Field Communications (NFC), the app will also support an iPhone case — the iPhone is still lacking a native NFC chip — for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, iPhone 4S that allows users to pay for bills at restaurants or stores simply by touching their phones to the payment terminal.
In the United States, NFC support has been widely increasing with Google launching its Wallet program last month that allows Americans to pay in select stores with their phones running its open source platform, Android.
The bank says it’s working on a solution for Android, and will have more news on that front “soon.”
“Our view today is that conditions are such that within 2 years….. the way we pay for transactions will be entirely different from the way we pay today,” David Lindberg, Executive General Manager, Credit Cards, Payments and Retail Strategy at the Commonwealth Bank said today.
Compared to just 2% last year, this year so far 28% of logins to the Commonwealth Bank’s platforms are from mobile devices in Australia with 91% from iPhones (79%) and the rest from Android handsets.
“This has been a four and a half project,” Lindberg said, referring to both today’s launch and the banks real-time network. ”We’re not trying to change the ecosystem of payments… this is another logical step for us to provide to our customers.”
Can one get an NFC case for iphone here in the Sydney Apple store yet?
Not yet – still in trial.