Facebook banking: Signing in soon

Innovations have always been a driving force for the business houses that inspires them to stay abreast with their competitors. Removing the bottlenecks and staying ahead of the pack bears the fruits in the run. Know-why and know-how to survive in the stiff competition has always drives the creativity. Face book, a star performer of social media arena is creating buzz on the air. Masses have touched new heights and closeness has been brought much closer to the palm reach. People feel a touch away with the social media inclusion irrespective of being thousand miles apart. Face book has a dream run since its launch in 2004, founded by Mark zuckerberg and its fellow college mates from Harvard University. The Face book membership was initially restricted to the Harvard University and then spread across the globe and rest is history. With more than one billion active users facebook has become most used social networking service worldwide. The world was smitten by the Social media giant. People have taken up facebook as it swepted them away. Businesses houses couldn’t draw parallels to facebook hence they turned up to facebook to advertise their core business and develop a competitive market. Most of the corporate have turned to the social media giant for their reachablity to the masses. Banking services have been the latest inclusion to the Social media, financial institutions have turned to the world’s leading social media to make their services easier and reachable at the finger tip and stay ahead of the pack in the competitive market. Innovations are creating a value added product/service which is the trend to survive. Every organization needs to be smart jacketed to stay ahead in the present economic competitiveness. The research and development heads of the organization are always on the run to access the channels, to get spotted in efficient and subjective way.” Face book is now not only socializing or getting the words out in 140 words or characters but has moved a long way from promoting of business houses to using banking services.”

Are we heading towards the era of Facebook Banking? Originally people presumed that Facebook would take over bank functions through stealth via Facebook credits. These were, in fact, worth about $1.5bn a year in revenue in 2011, about 15% of Facebook’s revenues, and were predicted to reach almost $50bn by 2014. Then Facebook made a move to drop Facebook credits in favour of using real currencies as dollar etc as they preferred to be more customer centric. Customers didn’t understand – a credit – rather they do understand – a dollar. The idea of face banking was to provide the customers a rationale platform to integrate their financial lives with the internet.

You still work with Facebook in the same way registering your credit or debit card details with facebook and then you can buy add-ins to games, apps and other media. Facebook had decided to take it through iTunes route for payments, where everyone is registered with an account profile and all they have to do is to confirm the payment’ from there. That’s a takeover move in banking. Facebook connect’ can be used as a secure bank logon like Fidor Bank in Germany has opted it. We must still consider Facebook to be a serious financial movement, credits or no credits. Commonwealth Bank of Australia and India’s ICICI Bank have taken upto the facebook to link up their financial lives and internet which is now facebook. Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for example, is building a Facebook app that will make it possible for customers to make payments to third parties through the social network. Funds can be transferred using this app and socializing simultaneously. Transactions are to be secured using the bank’s own authentication system. The bank says that it is not seeking to reinvent banking but rather to “help people manage their money and their lives” in ways that suited them. This seems to be the best way to keep people upgraded and be socially active. Similarly, ICICI Bank has recently launched a Facebook banking application which gives customers the ability to carry out various banking-related tasks, like keeping track of their accounts, transferring funds, paying bills. Bank has claimed that using this facebook App has features like secure SSL connection, factor authentication etc which makes it highly secure. More over these applications are subjected to separate personal identification number generated by the user which makes it even more secure. Even your Facebook ID is hacked the hacker will not be able to access the application.Citi bank is on the way to follow the facebook banking; the bank has been encouraging the discussion of launching the Fb banking App with the consumers on its Fb page.

All in all, as Facebook has becomes the major virtual place for 1 billion people on the mobile internet, it would be silly to imagine that it will not become the servicing area for consumers to access their bank details in the near future. The key for banks lies in making its services more convenient and reachable to the customers so that they can stay ahead of their competitors. With mutual benefit prevailing as Banks would make their services much reachable, innovate and grab more market and Fb will give users more reasons to stay logged on. Given some time maybe a year or two many more banks will be offering the service through this giant social media. With a secure authenticated mechanism banks are can certainly grab the opportunity of making people to use services via facebook.

Author a Research Scholar at LPU Punjab can be reached at: [email protected]

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