St George boosts mobile account creation

update St George is giving its mobile customers more freedom to bank on the go, announcing today that it will now allow users to open transaction and savings accounts from their smartphones, even if they aren't already customers with the bank.

St George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA customers can open and deposit money into a new account from their mobile at any time, without the need for an identity check.

The bank says that customers won't be able to withdraw what they've deposited until they've submitted to a 100-point identity check, however, in a bid to reduce fraudulent account activations.

Both the Android and iOS platforms will be able to open accounts on the go.

"Our aim is to continue to improve our mobile banking platforms so they not only give customers a convenient way to conduct their daily transactions, but also the ability for them to actually take up great offers while they are on the go," the bank group's head of eChannels Travis Tyler said in a statement.

Tyler is eying a 10 per cent increase in new deposit accounts. St George already opens 1000 deposit accounts each week online.

The initiative builds on the bank's mobile term-deposit offerings, which were first revealed by ZDNet Australia last November.

Updated at 2.50pm, 20 March 2012: we originally reported that the app would allow BlackBerry and Windows Phone customers to open accounts via mobile, when in fact only Android and iOS currently have this capacity.