Mobile banking has finally arrived on U.S. shores, only it apparently took the same route as those Mexican fishermen who were lost at sea for many months before somehow ending up in New Zealand.

As an application, mobile banking has been around for some time in other parts of the world, but never in the U.S. until now. A lot of people are saying it's because U.S. consumers are just more security conscious about their finances than people in Europe or elsewhere.

I don't know if that's really true or not--it more often seems like Americans have the view that everything's easily replaceable, whether it's money, property or good standing.

Some people might wonder why U.S. carriers haven't offered it yet, but it's really the banks that have the power to make mobile banking a reality. At Wireless 2007, AT&T obviously wouldn't have been able to launch a mobile banking service without cooperation, but at least one of its banking partners already had such a service without AT&T's cooperation. This week's announcements from CitiBank and Mastercard also don't rely on a specific carrier driving the application.

And if that's the case, why do banks need the carrier relationships anyway? Aren't they better off opening mobile banking up to anyone with a phone the same way they opened up online banking to anyone with a PC? It may hurt to hear it, but mobile banking is an example of an application in which the mobile network plays the role of dumb pipe. And if these services are going to be free, all mobile carriers have to gain is minutes of usage--nice, but hardly worth all the fuss and proclamation.

So, it's still not clear why it took so long for mobile banking to arrive in the U.S., but then again, maybe it's not that big of a deal.

A correction: Last week's column mentioned that Best Buy had acquired broadband wireless carrier Speakeasy, but Speakeasy's former wireless business actually is now owned by Towerstream. Instead it was Speakeasy's enterprise DSL business that Best Buy acquired. My bad.

E-mail me at doshea@telephonyonline.com.