Mobile Banking and other security whilst traveling

With more travel on the horizon for this year I,m considering my options for accessing my banking and email etc across the UK and abroard.
My thoughts are that using mobile might be safe? and viable in UK and EU, but once outside of here becomes expensive, so if using wifi on laptop is something like Opera's VPN secure enough?
Any thoughts?

Use your own equipment. e.g. laptop or phone. avoid public hardware such as Internet cafe or hotel PC.

I don't think email is as much of a concern as inter banking.

Banking traffic is over HTTPs with a secure certificate so even on a public network the data is not in cleartext, overall you have little to worry about, but a VPN is a good practice.

Should still be careful of "free wifi" as it is possible to setup proxies that would be a man in the middle for SSL encryption so that the client connects to the proxy and the proxy controls the SSL to the service. Generally browsers should warn of potential certificate issues. So, mobile networks are far more trustworthy than Internet Cafes or free wifi at the local bar.