The Commonwealth Bank is making mobile banking more accessible to small businesses, rolling out a number of new innovations to its social payments app CommBank Kaching this week.
Since launching Kaching for the iPhone last year, the app has been downloaded over 365,000 times and seen over $1 billion worths of transfer made. Now, the Commonwealth Bank has announced that the ‘peer-to-peer’ mobile payment app is now available for Google Android smartphones.
“As promised, today we gave Android users access to Kaching, which will particularly appeal to the youth market who are using Android,” Commonwealth Bank chief marketing and online officer Andy Lark said.
“We’ve been able to answer our customers request for a common experience across any device, while addressing the unique capabilities of different platforms and the diversity of the Android smartphone market,” Lark added.
The app will be available on 13 Android handsets, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, with users able to make peer-to-peer payments using a person’s mobile phone number, email address or to Facebook friends.
The bank has also enhanced its iOS version of Kaching with the new ‘Bump’ function. For the first time, iPhone users will be able to transfer and exchange money by bumping two smartphones together.
“We’re making banking simpler and more convenient,” said Lark.
Commonwealth Bank has also unveiled a preview of CommBank Kaching for Facebook, which will be released later this year. This version of the app will expand the social functionality of Kaching and make it possible for customers to do their banking without ever leaving Facebook. Customers will have access to their balances and transactions, make peer-to-peer and BPAY payments as well as third party transfer, with the security of NetCode SMS. For those security concerns, CBA has reminded customers of its 100 percent security guarantee, in which it covers any losses should someone make an unauthorised transaction on a customer’s account.
“The power of Facebook for payments is only now becoming clear. It will change banking for consumers and for small business – providing hundreds of thousands of merchants in Australia with full payments systems access. No matter how sophisticated a business’ online presence is, they will now have access to a state of the art payments capability, making a level playing field for all,” CBA executive general manager of card payments and retail strategy David Lindberg said.
Allowing users to ‘pay anyone, anywhere, anytime’, Kaching remains one of the most popular free finance apps in the Australian App Store.
