Imagine you are eating out with friends one night and when you receive your bill, you suddenly forget if you have enough money in your account to cover this meal.
If you don’t have enough money in your account, you will be overdrafting, meaning using funds you don’t have.
If this happens, your bank will pay for this transaction, but will also make you pay the money back and charge you an additional fee.
To prevent this, you have two options. You can either go to an ATM or bank to check your account, or you can use mobile banking.
Mobile banking is a feature many institutions have come out with due to the popularity of smart phones that allows people to perform different actions on their accounts by using their phones.
Users are able to check their account balance, manage transactions and make payments using these mobile apps.
Also, few banks offer a service that even allows you to deposit a check at your convenience. All you have to do is take a picture of the front and back of the signed check, and then the mobile app sends the picture to the bank for approval. Then the bank deposits the money into your account almost immediately.
Now imagine that when you go out to eat, one of your friends decides to help you out by paying for your meal.
Mobile banking now includes a tool that allows you to pay other individuals by using the mobile app to transfer money from your account to someone else’s account — all you have to do is enter the person’s name, phone number and the amount you want to give them.
Then they will receive a text telling them what to do.
The best part is that the sender and the recipient do not even need to have accounts at the same bank to be able to do this.
With all of these advances in banking on the go, it almost seems unnecessary to carry a wallet anymore.
In fact, even if some people do not want to use mobile banking, they can get cards that act as normal credit or debit cards but stick to the back of your phone, so all you need to do is get your phone scanned when you want to check out at the grocery store.
However, the biggest breakthrough so far is a tool called Google Wallet.
With this, you will not even need the card on the back of your phone, it stores all of your credit and debit cards on your phone.
When you want to pay for something, all you need to do is select the card you want to use and tap your phone to the sensor.
This method is actually safer than carrying a wallet because if someone gets a hold of your phone, they will need to unlock it and then type in your PIN number to use your Google Wallet account.
The goal with all these innovations is to make your cell phone the only thing you need to carry when you walk out of your house each morning.
So when you go out to eat with your friends, as long as you have your cell phone, you will be able to eat as much as you want.