Is the US lagging behind in the mobile banking realm? I’d say these numbers outside of the the US speak for themselves.

According to The National Bank of Kazakhstan, their 100-thousandth client registered in their mobile banking system on 14 September 2006. As far as we know, this is the best result of all Kazakh distance banking systems.
The system, unique in Kazakhstan, was launched on 19 April 2005 as part of a pilot project with VISA CEMEA - ‘Mobile Bank - Verified by Visa’. The service was initially accessible to subscribers of the GSM operator KaR-Tel (Beeline, K-mobile, Excess). On 25 June 2005 the mobile banking service was made available to users of the CDMA operator Altel (Dalacom, Pathword). On 11 August 2005 a third operator, GSM Kazakhstan, was added to the service, effectively ‘closing the loop’ on the entire Kazakh mobile market.
The simplicity of signing up and the convenience of the service allowed it to reach a serious production level by the end of the year. On January 29, ten months after launch, the system passed the million-message milestone. The second million-message milestone only took another three months to reach, on April 11. By the end of the year a million messages are expected monthly…. Source: Mobile Content Russia