Westpac enables mobile banking on Android and Blackberry

Westpac has stepped up its mobile banking capabilities, enabling customers with Blackberry and Android-based smartphones to access its banking services.

According to the bank customers with devices running Android 2.2+ and BlackBerry 6+ phone operating systems can now carry out a range of banking services previously available only via PC.

These include viewing balances and transactions, paying bills, transferring money between Westpac accounts, sending money to friends, family and businesses with an Australian account, and scheduling and managing payments.

The bank current allows iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users running iOS 3.0 or later to access online banking via the Safari browser or via a dedicated app now in version 3.5.

According to the bank the iPhone apps released over 18 months ago.

There bank currently has no app for Android-based devices and mobile banking for other mobile devices is being considered.

Security for the mobile banking services is provided via an SMS Code to confirm certain transactions via text message and SecurID to generate digital security codes for use with customer passwords when authorising online payments.

The announcement of the service follows Westpac’s recovery of its IT systems following a glitch last week that resulted in the outage of its online banking services and numerous ATM and EFTPOS facilities.

The bank later attributed the glitch to an air conditioning fault at one of the bank’s data centres.

Westpac also suffered a run of issues with its online banking portal for a two week period during March resulting in customers having difficulty logging onto the service.

Follow Tim Lohman on Twitter: @Tlohman

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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