This is a guest post from Myriam Da Costa, a researcher serving eBusiness & Channel Strategy professionals.

France has been quick to embrace mobile banking. Banks like BNP Paribas and Société Générale were among the pioneers of mobile banking in Europe and since 2009, all of the big French banks have launched iPhone mobile banking apps, so most French banks now offer several forms of mobile banking. The first wave of mobile banking was about getting the basics down and offering customers functionality like balances, transaction histories and SMS alerts. The second wave now focuses on money transfers and payments.

As we wrote in our report on The State Of Mobile Banking In Europe 2012, mobile banking is the foundation for mobile payments. France's banks and mobile operators are moving fast to seize the opportunity. In the past two years there has been a wave of new mobile payment initiatives in France: Buyster, Cityzi, Kwixo, Kix and S-money.

Everyone is talking about it, everyone is doing it, and everyone wants one. Social, mobile, and tablets are creating digital banking disruption and fundamentally shaking up how banks interact with and serve their customers. The rise of the digital channels has given banks a unique opportunity to drive lower-complexity, everyday tasks to digital channels while beginning to refocus live channels to provide guidance and support for more complex, relationship-building activities. Disruption brings opportunity both for you and for the disruptors, who are faster, stronger, and sometimes even better at giving customers what they really want, more conveniently than before. Disruptors are setting the pace for customer adoption of more complex digital financial services. So the question is, how do you turn digital disruption into opportunity and fundamentally rethink how social, mobile, and tablets can transform your consumer banking experience?

On October 25, at the Forrester eBusiness & Channel Strategy Forum in Chicago, I will be exploring how social, mobile, and tablets are empowering eBusiness professionals to revolutionize the retail banking environment. In this session, I will discuss how: 

• Few financial services companies have fully explored social media. A comparative scan of social media marketing efforts shows that few financial services firms are using social media marketing effectively compared with other industries. Financial services firms haven't been blind to their customers' adoption of social tools, but it's clear that the industry hasn't fully embraced social technologies either.

Some leading banks have already seen the number of mobile interactions overtake the number of online interactions. The evolution of mobile devices coupled with rising smartphone and mobile banking adoption is evolving banking customers’ needs and will fundamentally change the way eBusiness professionals need to view technology and customer support. We expect mobile banking to grow rapidly over the next few years, but digital banking teams will have to overcome many challenges to stay on par with Forrester’s projected growth, or risk being left behind. In our recent report The State Of Mobile Banking 2012, we help eBusiness and channel strategy professionals understand the most important trends in mobile banking, including:

• Mobile banking will soon be mainstream. Fueled by the adoption of smartphones and the growing supply of mobile banking, the use of mobile banking has grown steadily over the past few years. We expect the number of US mobile banking users to double in the next five years and reach 108 million by 2017 -- 46% of US bank account holders.
• Everyday banking relationships are moving to mobile. Consumers are progressing from simply checking their account balances or locating an ATM to making bill payments or transferring money to other accounts on their mobile phones. As that happens, mobile banking is displacing use of other channels like branches and online banking.

The longer we spend researching mobile banking, the more convinced I become that mobile banking is the most important innovation, or cluster of innovations, in retail banking in years, arguably in a century. Here’s why I think mobile banking is a much bigger deal than cash machines (ATMs), credit cards or home-based online banking:

• In developing economies that lack a dense infrastructure of branches, ATMs and fixed-line telecoms, mobile banking and payments are bringing millions of people into the formal banking system for the first time.
• In developed economies mobile banking will become the primary way many, perhaps most, customers interact with their banks. Banks need mobile banking to provide a platform for mobile payments and to protect their retail payments businesses from digital disruption as mobile payments start to replace card payments in shops.