Nationwide to launch PDA banking service

Nationwide Building Society is betting that personal digital assistants (PDAs) will win out over smart phones for wireless banking.

The company launched a service at the end of last year that will initially offer access to product information, account balances and mini-statements via Pocket PC-based devices running Microsoft's Windows CE operating system.

Nationwide will offer funds transfers and bill payments in around three months.

"We've been looking at PDAs because we think it's a market that will grow significantly in the short to medium term. We aren't doing this because there are masses of users at the moment, but we think that there will be big growth," Terry Kay, electronic access controller at Nationwide, told Computing.

"We haven't announced a date for Wap services but it is something we are looking at. Wap is still in development but we think PDAs are the right thing to develop at the moment. We are launching this service because we think it is the one that will be a real winner," he added.

Users of Psion or Palm devices will be unable to use the service, despite representing the vast majority of handheld users, but Kay said: "We are looking at other devices. But we think there will be a shift in the market towards the Pocket PC which has been well received because it looks like Windows, so it's not a great leap of faith for the customers."

The service took four weeks to develop, according to Kay, because of Nationwide's use of XML technology. "We've been quietly working on XML for our other services and that could be reused quickly. We already had the XML and it was just a case of changing the style sheets. We see that as a real bonus," he said.

Nationwide has a complex set of systems, including mainframes from ICL, Tandem, Unisys and IBM, and 30 Windows NT servers. The company administers all its core systems in-house.

Microsoft's Pocket PC devices will have a 30 per cent market share for PDAs and smart phones by the end of next year, according to analyst Gartner.

Vendors including Casio, Compaq, Symbol and Hewlett Packard have all been using the operating system since last year.