Finance and Economic

British bank Standard Chartered is reportedly shifting thousands of its bankers to Apple Inc.'s iPhone from Research in Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry devices.

"It's a group-wide initiative involving wholesale and consumer banks globally," a spokeswoman for Standard Chartered told Reuters.

Bankers until now have for the most part been restricted to RIM's (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry as the standard device issued by their firms, largely because of security concerns with Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) smartphone in the past.

"If more companies switch to the iPhone, this is of course bad news for RIM," Lu Chialin, an analyst at Macquarie Securities told Reuters. "However, it will take a long time for companies to do their own internal testing before deciding to change, so it will be a while before it has any effect on RIM."

A study by NPD Group last week said RIM was No. 1 in first quarter U.S. market share with 36 percent, with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) No. 2 at 28 percent and Apple No. 3 at 21 percent.

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