Vendors Peddle at BAI Conference

Bank Technology News | November, 2009

A number of tech vendors used last week’s BAI Retail Delivery conference in Boston to
announce new partnerships, many of them focusing on mobile banking capabilities.

Among the more significant announcements, ClairMail signed a development and deployment agreement with Visa to integrate mobile banking and payments infrastructure. The merged technology will include applications that support mobile payments, tailored merchant offers and quick transaction alerts and notifications—optimized across SMS, email, mobile Web or smart client application.

In an initial phase, Visa’s transactional mobile alerts will be rolled into and delivered via ClairMail’s platform to banks and bank customers. Later rollouts will include mobile payments and customized merchant offers.

“This allows existing customers to turn on new capabilities without a back end connection,” says Joe Salesky, ClairMail’s founder. “We were already doing actionable alerting, and now we’re getting real-time information from the Visa network, and we’re making those services actionable.”

The deal with Visa comes as ClairMail releases an end-to-end mobile banking adoption services offering, including planning, implementation, marketing and analysis. A key feature enables multi channel enrollment to all bank customers, rather than relying heavily on online banking as a an enrollment vehicle for mobile banking.

Other mobile partnerships include a deal between Digital Insights and Citi-backed Mobile Money Ventures, which means MMV is abandoing its earlier partnership with mShift. Firethorn Holdings announced a deal with CashEdge to integrate money transfer capablities into its downloadable mobile banking application. Fideity Information Services also anounced that it would integrate PayPal' s person-to-person payment functionality into its online and mobile banking offerings.

Two other firms, uMonitor and T8 Webware, also announced a strategic alliance. T8 provides non-template driven web sites to more than 160 banks and credit unions, all of which are mobile-optimized. uMonitor increases site productivity via services such as an online account opening and funding solution with switch kit. The two firms hope the combination will provide a “virtual branch web experience” with the presence and capabilities of a brick and mortar branch.