Peter Dalton, ANZ's group general manager for innovation, said that his company's banking app is more secure on the iPhone because of Apple's strict application screening process. The statement comes as the company quietly released its new mobile banking app into the iTunes App Store last Friday. ANZ's new app, which is called goMoney, allows users to combine mobile transactional banking with new capabilities such as sending payments to anyone with only the use of a phone number as a point of reference.

ANZ claims that it has four million users registered to its internet banking customers database. About two million in the database are classified as "active," meaning that users had logged on to the service within the last 90 days. Dalton noted that iPhones and iPod Touch devices were responsible for about 90 per cent of mobile access to ANZ's Web site, which is why the company decided to launch goMoney to the iTunes App Store first.

"The model (for applications) that the iPhone has, which draws some criticism, actually makes security very good for us. Apps can only get onto iPhones, generally speaking, if they're through the App Store, and Apple have a pretty rigorous review process," said Dalton.

Dalton adds that his company does not want other applications possibly interfering with its software.

"There are other models in the market that are maturing, but at the point we began this, the most popular device was the iPhone and we saw the security model as being that much better for us."