The next phase of digital banking will go beyond giving consumers easier access to their accounts and banking services to giving consumers easier access to their accounts and banking where they want it.

Consider online banking. In most cases, you go to a bank’s online banking platform, log in, and manipulate your finances on the bank’s digital turf. But that’s the only thing you do at the bank’s platform. Sure, some banks have tried to beef up their banking portal with additional functionality — Bank of America’s online “mall” comes to mind — but, by and large, the online bank portal remains a one-dimensional application.

Not surprisingly, banking services will continue to move away from the bank’s portal. We’ve already seen developments on the mobile front. Next up: email and Facebook banking. Why force consumers to go to a portal when they can do whatever banking they want to do within the body of an email? Or, what about Facebook? The fact is Facebook users spend an inordinate amount of time on the site. In fact, the site is the web for some of them, in the sense that most of their monthly page visits are within the site. See this graph:

661 page views a month is a big number, so why not allow for Facebook users to bank within Facebook? Banks have set up branches within retail outlets before.

I guess we can call this offsite digital banking (or something like that), but whatever the name, it is coming. The technology is on its way.