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Bank of East Asia (BEA) will score another first for Hong Kong next month when it rolls out a wireless banking service for use on personal digital assistants (PDAs).

The full-scale launch will maintain the first-mover advantage BEA has commanded over rivals since being the first local bank to introduce Internet banking in September 1999.

The biggest advantage the new service will offer over existing mobile-banking services that can be accessed on wireless application protocol (WAP) telephones is speed, said Vincent Hui, head of e-Distribution for the bank.

'Transmissions on mobile phones are usually done at 9.6 kilobits per second, or 9,600 bits per second,' he said.

'Now we use a mobile card in the PDAs that offers 43k transmission speeds, or 43,000 bits per second - so that transmission is now almost five times faster.'

Mr Hui said the technology meant that responses on the PDAs for which the service had been prepared - Compaq's iPaq and Hewlett Packard's Jornada - was now equivalent to using a personal computer and a fixed line to access the Internet.

Next in line for the service was the Palm PDA, which had a far larger user base in Hong Kong - estimated at more than 200,000, compared with about 50,000 Compaq users.

Services which customers could now access on their PDAs would include account inquiry, balance inquiry, account summary, funds transfer and bill payment, he said.

A key challenge in bringing the service to the market first was providing security, and BEA had built several layers of security into its PDA service, Mr Hui said.

The first level of security was offered by a PIN, or personal identification number; the second by secure socket layer (SSL) 128-bit encryption onto which was built a third security check provided by another layer of encryption using the PDA's security module for WinCE 3.0.

BEA has invested heavily in e-banking technology, having spent HK$20 million in 1999 and another HK$20 million last year.  'Now we have passed the peak point of our investment and costs are coming down significantly from these levels,' Mr Hui said.

According to Mr Hui, the results of the investment had been encouraging and since the launch of its online 'cyberbanking' service, BEA had attracted 140,000 subscribers, 60,000 of whom were new customers.

'Do the maths. If every one of the new customers is bringing in HK$10,000 or HK$50,000 in deposits, that is already a huge amount,' he said.

'But the most significant part is that they bring in a lot of opportunities for us, and to cope with that, we established a telemarketing team to sell products to these customers.'



PDA service brings another local first as pioneer sharpens first-mover edge