Media and entertainment are possibilities, but small screens are not a good way to display such content. Consumers are unlikely to rack up big charges to play games by the minute on mobile wireless devices when they can while away their time on a Game Boy for nothing. By contrast, financial content is well suited to the mobile phone. Even though the screen isn't as easy on the eyes as an ATM or a PC monitor, it's still large enough for consumers to check balances, pay bills, move money among accounts, and perform just about any other routine banking transaction. As voice recognition and 3G wireless technology develops, accomplishing such tasks on a mobile device will become even easier.
Consumers can carry a checkbook anywhere and use idle moments to write checks and tally balances.
But what's missing, and what wireless delivers, is the interactivity to perform transactions on the spot. From the telecom providers' perspective, financial content is literally where the money is. In fact, it is the raw material of the existing telecom franchise. Twenty years ago, Citicorp's then-chairman Walter Wriston observed that the stream of electrons that carried a bank's foreign exchange positions via a satellite was indistinguishable from the signal carrying the morning news. Today, a satellite transponder may connect a business traveler via cell phone to his office in New York while he's paying for a meal in a London restaurant, and simultaneously link his credit card to a bank computer in South Dakota to clear the payment.