Banks are rushing to bring mobile banking applications to market, betting it is the next big thing, but a leading industry consultant believes few financial institutions have created a workable mobile banking model.Gartner analyst David Furlonger told delegates at the Banktech conference, held in Sydney yesterday, that most of the banks his group had surveyed said customers used mobile banking to check their balances and little else.Furlonger said: "That is not a recipe for making money. We are cautious about mobile and we question the value proposition of the service."Standard Chartered Bank's chief information officer for Malaysia, Arif Siddiqui, said mobile was a challenge because of different mobile vendor systems. Siddiqui said his bank had developed a number of tools, such as loan calculators, to go with its mobile service. The bank is also using the mobile service for messaging. "The customer can ask us to send a message when a particular transaction has been executed, when the transaction has been over a certain amount or when a particular payment method has been used."This service reduces the number of calls to the call centre.ANZ's chief information officer, Anne Weatherston, said part of the bank's IT function was to facilitate a change in the business model to accommodate a multi-channel service that included mobile banking. Weatherston said: "Solutions for branch, internet and mobile must be integrated. That requires a different business model."