The New York banking company is offering, testing, or developing four mobile applications in this country and says that, though it is not certain which of these will take off with consumers, the multipronged approach will ensure that Citi has something to offer when mainstream consumers are ready to bank by phone.
Citi is also developing ways to deliver these mobile services as both individual products and bundled offerings, in an effort to create a diverse product line.
Steven Kietz, the business manager for Citi's e-commerce unit, said the company is planning to combine the person-to-person money-transfer system it is testing from Obopay Inc. with several other mobile banking capabilities it is developing through its Mobile Money Ventures LLC joint venture with the South Korean wireless carrier SK Telecom Co. Ltd.
Citi has been testing Obopay's mobile-transfer software since last year with its checking account customers and will continue to offer it as a stand-alone service, said Mr. Kietz, who is also the chief executive of Mobile Money Ventures. "I think the target market for that product is the youth-unbanked-underbanked" cohort, he said, "the target market for the Mobile Money downloadable is someone with a more developed financial history and experience."
Banks often offer multiple versions of some products, he said, each aimed at a different market. For example, "we have three flavors of checking," Mr. Kietz said.
He also said that people with more extensive financial needs — the target market for the bundled offering — are more likely to have a more powerful phone, which would be better suited to running the more complex software that would result from combining Obopay's technology with that of Mobile Money Ventures.
Younger people are more likely to have more basic phones, he said, which fit better with the stand-alone Obopay application.
Citi plans to bundle by yearend the Obopay transfer technology with the Mobile Money Ventures banking software. The joint venture was created in October and is expected to begin testing its software in the second half. By yearend it would also offer the Obopay service internationally; it may later offer it in the United States, Mr. Kietz said in an interview after a mobile-banking panel discussion at the Financial Services Business and Technology Conference here last week, organized by TowerGroup Inc., an independent research unit of MasterCard Inc.
Asia, and especially India, are potential markets for a Mobile Money Ventures service that incorporates Obopay, he said.
(Obopay, a Redwood City, Calif., vendor, already offers a transfer service in the United States and India on its own.)
Besides Mobile Money Ventures and Obopay, Citi has two other services: a mobile banking service using software from mFoundry Inc., and an account management service for credit card customers, using software from Firethorn Holdings LLC, a unit of Qualcomm Inc.
Citi is not the only bank pursuing multiple mobile strategies.
Wachovia Corp., for example, has a mobile banking service using Firethorn software, as well as a version of its Web site designed to be accessible through mobile phone browsers.
"We want to be sure that we're providing the kind of service that our customers expect, particularly in the mobile channel," John Watkins, a Wachovia senior vice president and the online services director for its e-commerce unit, said during the panel discussion at the conference. "Our strategy has been to try some of all of it."
