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In the late 1990s and early 2000s, banking has undergone and is still undergoing some considerable changes, adjusting itself to the new circumstances and challenges in its environment. Modern information technologies have granted an opportunity to banks to expand their operations and adjust their offer of products and services, placing them through the new communication channels. The increasing reliance on mobile devices, especially the so-called smart phones, has facilitated the development of a new form of banking, known as mobile banking. Mobile banking is a specific channel of electronic banking, enabling clients to communicate with the bank via mobile devices. The bank's products and services are, thus, available to the clients at any time and at any place, and the banking sector is expected to perfectly understand the needs of today's clients, before implementing mobile banking. The research in this paper focuses on mobile banking, as a segment of electronic banking, which has developed under the influence of modern information technologies. The paper elaborates on the main characteristics of mobile banking, its advantages, but also its drawbacks that the banks and their clients are facing in the process of its utilization (or its implementation in practice). Moreover, the paper presents the trends of using mobile banking in the world and in Serbia, along with the tendencies for developing new services.

Ecologically divergent selection can lead to the evolution of reproductive isolation through the process of ecological speciation, but the balance of responsible evolutionary forces is often obscured by an inadequate assessment of demographic history and the genetics of traits under selection. Snake venoms have emerged as a system for studying the genetic basis of adaptation because of their genetic tractability and contributions to fitness, and speciation in venomous snakes can be associated with ecological diversification such as dietary shifts and corresponding venom changes. Here, we explored the neurotoxic (type A)-hemotoxic (type B) venom dichotomy and the potential for ecological speciation among Timber Rattlesnake ( Crotalus horridus ) populations. Previous work identified the genetic basis of this phenotypic difference, enabling us to characterize the roles geography, history, ecology, selection, and chance play in determining when and why new species emerge or are absorbed. We identified significant genetic, proteomic, morphological, and ecological/environmental differences at smaller spatial scales, suggestive of incipient ecological speciation between type A and type B C. horridus . Range-wide analyses, however, rejected the reciprocal monophyly of venom type, indicative of varying intensities of introgression and a lack of reproductive isolation across the range. Given that we have now established the phenotypic distributions and ecological niche models of type A and B populations, genome-wide data are needed and capable of determining whether type A and type B C. horridus represent distinct, reproductively isolated lineages due to incipient ecological speciation or differentiated populations within a single species.

Selection can vary geographically across environments and temporally over the lifetime of an individual. Unlike geographic contexts, where different selective regimes can act on different alleles, age-specific selection is constrained to act on the same genome by altering age-specific expression. Snake venoms are exceptional traits for studying ontogeny because toxin expression variation directly changes the phenotype; relative amounts of venom components determine, in part, venom efficacy. Phenotypic integration is the dependent relationship between different traits that collectively produce a complex phenotype and, in venomous snakes, may include traits as diverse as venom, head shape and fang length. We examined the feeding system of the eastern diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus) across environments and over the lifetime of individuals and used a genotype-phenotype map approach, protein expression data and morphological data to demonstrate that: (i) ontogenetic effects explained more of the variation in toxin expression variation than geographic effects, (ii) both juveniles and adults varied geographically, (iii) toxin expression variation was a result of directional selection and (iv) different venom phenotypes covaried with morphological traits also associated with feeding in temporal (ontogenetic) and geographic (functional) contexts. These data are the first to demonstrate, to our knowledge, phenotypic integration between multiple morphological characters and a biochemical phenotype across populations and age classes. We identified copy number variation as the mechanism driving the difference in the venom phenotype associated with these morphological differences, and the parallel mitochondrial, venom and morphological divergence between northern and southern clades suggests that each clade may warrant classification as a separate evolutionarily significant unit., (© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)