(Photo credit: Standard Chartered Bank)
Don’t you just hate it when you climb to the peak of Mount Everest and find yourself unable to engage in mobile banking activities?
Yes, the financial world keeps moving and pays no heed to your momentous achievement of scaling the highest mountain on Earth. If you foresee yourself getting into a tangle like this, you may at least rest easy knowing that two mountaineers are currently on their way up to the peak of Mount Everest just to prove that it’s possible.
Sponsored by Standard Chartered Bank, Horacio Galanti and Horacio Cunietti will attempt to trade stocks and transfer funds at the peak through the bank’s Breeze mobile banking apps.
The two Horacios have already managed to do it once at the Everest Base Camp, where they successfully transferred money and placed an order on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange 5,364m above sea level.
Now, the final challenge remains: to push the boundaries of mobile banking by doing the same at the top of the world, 8,848 metres above sea level.
But why? What’s the point of doing this at all?
“Because we can,” said May Meere, Standard Chartered Bank’s head of external communications, at a local media event last week, echoing historic English mountaineer George Mallory’s famous retort to a similar question. When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, Mallory replied, “Because it’s there.”
The bank claims that not every mobile banking app can handle being used on Mount Everest, but we all know what matters is the hardware. The two climbers will be bringing with them a variety of smartphones and tablets, including the BlackBerry Z10 and the iPhone, and a solar-powered charging pack to juice them up. This is on top of the standard fare of walkie-talkies and Iridium satellite phones that all climbers attempting Everest carry.
(Photo credit: Standard Chartered Bank)
Galanti and Cunietti will also help clear the trash on their way down, adding an element of environmentalism to the expedition.
No doubt, the entire expedition can be dismissed as a marketing gimmick by Standard Chartered Bank. The human spirit behind it, however, shouldn’t be. The team will be encountering extreme conditions on their journey, including ice, snow, moving glaciers, hurricane force winds and temperatures that dip to -30 degrees Celcius, all in pursuit of one of the defining characteristics of our species: to do things never before done by anyone else.
If you’re interested in following their journey, head over to the Breeze blog for more.
