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Cell phone banking, more commonly known as mobile phone banking, is the latest self service channel that banks have opened up to their customers. Its biggest appeal is convenience. As with Internet banking, you can access your accounts info at any time of day, but it offers the additional convenience of being able to access your accounts from anywhere. (Okay, I suppose you can access Internet banking from anywhere if you happen to carry a laptop about with you, but a phone's something we always have on us whereas a laptop's not!)

Alongside convenience, however, another factor that people have to weigh up is security. Is the service secure? What happens if I lose my phone? The scare stories that surround Internet banking have also added to the prominence that people place on security these days.

So, let's look at a typical security model for mobile phone banking. The first thing to say is that the logon process will require the user to enter a passcode or password (or a combination of these), in the same way as you already do if you use Internet banking. You can increase the security surrounding your passcode details by not writing them down anywhere (and not saving them on your phone!) and by choosing a passcode or password that is not easy to guess. i.e. Don't choose your year of birth, or your pet's name.

The next important thing to point out is that no banking data is stored on your phone, so if you lost your mobile handset, a fraudster would not be able to retrieve any banking details from your phone. Instead, you just download an applet onto your phone and all the data is stored on servers rather than the phone.

Additionally, only a registered handset that is linked to the account can be used to access the account information. What that means is that it is only possible to access the service from your specific mobile phone using your specific passcode. This is quite an important point, as I'll illustrate by making a comparison with Internet banking.

With Internet banking, account information can be accessed by putting specific logon credentials into any computer that has Internet access. So, if a fraudster gains hold of your security details, then they stand a good chance of compromising your accounts. However, for mobile phone banking, they would require not only to have your security details but also to have got hold of your phone.

Banks have been strengthening the security of Internet banking by rolling out something called Two-Factor

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