Commonwealth Bank yesterday demonstrated a banking application for Facebook that will allow customers to view their accounts and execute transactions without ever leaving the social network. The bank plans to release the app - which will share the Kaching label with its smartphone cousin - before the end of the year.Andy Lark, CBA's chief marketing officer, acknowledged that there would be "a lot of customers who do not think their financial data should be on Facebook.""We don't underestimate the challenge of banking in Facebook."CBA already allows users of the Kaching payments app on smartphones or tablet computers to make a payment to a Facebook user. So far only a fraction of the 365,000 people who have downloaded the app have made such a payment. The bank said the Facebook option is the second least popular payment option; only email payments are a less favoured choice.Even so, the bank believes that there is growing demand for social-network-based services.A survey conducted by Forrester in late 2010 found that even then 42 per cent of adult users of social networks would have liked to be able to interact with financial service providers through such networks.Security and privacy are two key hurdles, but CBA seems to have deliberately separated these issues. It sees security as its responsibility and said it will extend its guarantee to cover any losses from an unauthorised transaction on a customer's account. Privacy, though, "is up to the consumer," Lark said.