Mobile banking services branch out

The mobile banking and payments space continues to gather momentum, with banks exploring and announcing new services, and solutions providers forging new partnerships to enable the applications.
Just within the past two months, a number of banks in the U.S. and abroad have begun marketing mobile banking services to their customers and various deals have come to light that reflect the high interest in the space.
Wells Fargo & Co., which is the fifth-largest U.S. bank by assets, announced last month that it had launched Wells Fargo Mobile. The company’s mobile Web-based service allows customers to use their phone’s browser to check account balances including savings, mortgages, home equity, brokerage, auto loan, student loan and credit-card accounts; view a transaction history and transfer money between eligible Wells Fargo accounts. The company introduced a CEO Mobile service in May to cater to businesses’ financial needs.
Bank of Hawaii recently launched a Web-based mobile service for bill paying, transaction and balance information, and money transfers-which allowed customers to continue to make transactions even when bank branches were closed last week due to the threat of a hurricane.
Underscoring the importance of discovery for mobile applications, Verizon Wireless and Bank of America announced that the bank’s mobile application was now easier for the carrier’s subscribers to find on its deck, due to a redesign of the carrier’s Mobile Web portal.
First Data Corp., which provides electronic commerce and payment services worldwide and serves 1,900 card issuers and more than 5 million merchant locations, recently announced a partnership with mobile application platform provider mFoundry to enable financial institutions to offer mobile banking services.
Brian Friedman, VP of innovation for First Data Financial Institution Services, described two application paths that banks will be able to follow as a result of the partnership: a feature-rich version of mFoundry’s mobile banking application similar to an Internet banking environment, hosted and offered as a managed service by First Data; and a “lighter version of mobile banking” with scaled down functions, primarily focused on balance and transaction information.
Banks are at a wide range of stages in their strategies on mobile financial services, Friedman said.
“Some [banks] are a lot more aggressive than others and may be interested in the full banking features and functions, whereas others that might be a little more cautious, shall we say, might start out with the lighter version and then possibly migrate into the full version as they get more consumer interest-and as time goes on, it should grow,” Friedman said.
The relationship is expected to open up mobile banking opportunities to more than 5,400 financial institutions that are members of First Data’s STAR Network. Both companies have also agreed to pursue opportunities to support near field communications technology and to work with both mobile operators and financial institutions to bring new mobile financial applications to market.
Meanwhile, mobile banking platform provider Clairmail, which has emphasized the use of SMS for wireless financial transactions, has a platform that allows banks to choose SMS, mobile Web or a downloadable client as a user interface-although, as Clairmail VP of Marketing David Thompson noted, SMS in particular still has the most ubiquitous use across a variety of handsets and operating systems.
The company, which provides mobile banking services for institutions such as the California-based Bank of Stockton, said that while it believes SMS has the greatest potential for adoption, banks want to serve multiple customer segments, some of whom may be more comfortable with a mobile Web-based experience or a native client.
Clairmail would not develop the banking applications, but would work with a third-party developer of the bank’s choice in order to ensure that they would be compatible with the company’s platform, Thompson said.
He added that interest in mobile financial applications is spreading beyond the retail aspect of banking.
“The credit-card side as well as the retail side, those two areas of the bank are most interested,” Thompson said. “I think maybe in the six-month timeframe, we’ll start to see the wholesale side of the bank looking at this” for businesses.