AT&T today announced the launch of its mobile banking platform, designed to allow customers to view their account balance and history, transfer funds and pay bills from their mobile phones. The offering is currently limited to customers of Wachovia, SunTrust, Bancorp South, FirstBank, Synovus, Regions Financial Corp, America First Credit Union, and Arvest Bank Group.

The application will be embedded in AT&T handsets starting later this year. In the meantime, it's available for download on over 30 of the company's current handsets. The application is secured with a PIN number, and all data is encrypted. There's no additional fee for the service.

Red Herring's Casimir Medford says the fact that only two large banks (Wachovia and SunTrust) are part of this announcement shows how challenging mobile banking can be. "Mobile banking, the ability to check balances, pay bills, or transfer funds on cell phones, has emerged at glacial speed in the United States in part because nationwide banks have been slow to adopt it, but also because consumers are not exactly clamoring for it," he writes.

More here from InformationWeek ... more here from Network World ... more here from RCR Wireless News ... and the press release is here.