Many of those signing up are younger customers who are already familiar with technologies such as text messaging and want the convenience and flexibility of mobile banking, Vavreck said.
‘‘This service is perfect for them,” he said. ‘‘It’s accessible from just about anywhere and represents the latest technological innovations that we are able to offer.”
About 41 million customers across the nation plan to do their banking using mobile devices at least once every 90 days by 2012, according to TowerGroup, a research company in Needham, Mass.
‘‘Demographic shifts and new customer expectations, along with technology maturity, are converging to create fertile ground for mobile banking,” Virginia Garcia, research director in TowerGroup’s Emerging Technologies practice, said in a statement. ‘‘Within a few years, the mobile device will be the primary access point for consumer banking.”
Provident put together its package relatively quickly, working with Mshift, a San Jose, Calif., provider of mobile banking services for other banks such as Cardinal Bank of McLean, Va. Cardinal, which has a Bethesda branch, has assets of $1.7 billion, compared with Provident’s $6.4 billion in assets.
Mshift also provides mobile banking to numerous credit unions, including the State Employees Credit Union of Maryland. The Linthicum credit union, which has about 250,000 members and assets of $1.8 billion, also recently rolled out mobile banking.
The system is encrypted using a highly secure wireless security protocol, said Josh Pilachowski, application support manager for the credit union.
Kim Harris, a Baltimore engineer and credit union member, is sold on mobile banking.
‘‘For people with PDAs or for those who use the Internet a lot on their phones, this could be a deciding factor in choosing a financial institution,” Harris said in a statement.
Customers can use mobile banking to make payments, view current balances, locate branches and ATMs, transfer funds between accounts and perform other transactions. Among Provident customers who mobile bank, about half use cell phones and half use PDAs, Vavreck said.
Mobile banking was introduced this decade but did not immediately take off because the right technology to make it easily accessible was not in place, Vavreck said. ‘‘The phones have now caught up with the technology,” he said.
Provident is introducing mobile banking to consumer customers and is reviewing doing so to its small-business clients, Vavreck said.
Bank of America, the largest bank in Maryland with $17.4 billion in deposits as of last June, has offered mobile banking to customers for more than a year and has more than 500,000 customers using it. That’s more than all other U.S. banks combined, according to a report by the TowerGroup.
Other large institutions that offer the service include SunTrust Banks of Atlanta, also one of Maryland’s largest banks in deposits.
