Wireless carrier Cellular South will provide mobile banking services to customers who bank with Regions Bank, one of the nation's largest providers of consumer and commercial banking services.

Cellular South now offers its free wireless mobile banking application to customers who bank with Regions and eight other Mid-South financial institutions, including BancorpSouth, SunTrust, USAA, Wachovia, Trust One, Coastal Bank and Trust, Vanguard and Bank of Pensacola in the Mid-South region.

"This is very much a part of our mobile commerce strategy," said Steve Davidson, manager of product development for Cellular South, Ridgeland, MS. "We see a lot of growth in this area, and mobile banking is a foundational piece of the mobile commerce puzzle.

"We see things advancing much further -- credit cards inside the application itself, moving to contactless payments, using the mobile phone as a virtual credit card," he said.

"Regions Bank is a very prominent bank in our service territory, and we have a lot of mutual customers, so it was imperative that we give their customers access to mobile banking."

The new mobile service will bring online banking to Regions' customers' wireless phones.

The mobile banking application is available on various mobile phones, including Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices such as the Curve, the Pearl and the World Edition.

The service allows individuals who are customers of both Cellular South and participating banks to view account balances and history, transfer funds and pay bills from their mobile handsets through a secure, PIN-protected gateway.

A recent Harris Interactive study revealed that consumer demand for mobile banking among wireless customers is continuing to grow.

Sixteen percent of U.S. adults say they already use the services.

Another 35 percent report that they are open to checking bank account balances and transferring funds via their mobile phone, smartphone or PDA.

To use Cellular South's mobile banking feature, customers must have an account with a participating bank, such as Regions, and must enable online access to their account, a free feature at most banks.

Consumers who sign up for Cellular South's mobile banking receive a secure initialization code and can access and monitor multiple bank accounts from the same application and PIN.

Cellular South offers a suite of mobile commerce applications to customers across the Southeast region, continues to make the wireless lifestyle easily accessible.

Cellular South has 780,000 customers and operates in four states: Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida.

The Regions mobile banking service is available to its customers in those states.

The bank has 5 million customers across the 16 states in which it operates.

These are TX, AL, AR, FL, GA, IL, IN, IA, KY, LA, MS, MO, NC, SC, TN and VA.

"Mobile banking is definitely getting to where it's reaching the tipping point, as more and more banks are offering mobile banking with the carriers -- every couple of weeks we here of a new bank that's launched mobile services," Mr. Davidson said. "We want to stay at the forefront of all that and give mobile access to our customers immediately.

"Banks are seeing mobile banking as a key differentiator, and more than just a trend," he said. "It's viewed as an integral part of their business planning, given the near ubiquitous nature of wireless devices.

Contactless payments is coming, although barriers to mass-market adoption remain.

"Contactless payments is very much something that has a very big ecosystem associated with it," Mr. Davidson said. "A lot of parties need to invest in the technology, merchants need contactless readers in stores, phones need contactless chips, banks need to issue certain types of credit cards, so there are a lot of moving parts.

"Mobile banking is a foundational piece of mobile commerce to get a wallet established on your handset, doing very traditional things you're used to doing in online banking on your handset," he said. "We're seeing a migration path with more and more technology advancements in the space."