The New York company rolled out a text-message mobile service in the Philippines last month and is planning to launch one in September in Hong Kong using a browser model. Steven Kietz, the Citi executive vice president spearheading the global effort, said that the browser is emerging as the preferred method worldwide for accessing financial services with phones, as opposed to text and downloadable applications.
Citi has put a lot of effort into determining how and where to use each of three access technologies, said Mr. Kietz, who also is the chief executive of Mobile Money Ventures LLC, the mobile technology joint venture Citi and the South Korean wireless carrier SK Telecom Co. Ltd. created in March. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver services that are tweaked to appeal to each market, in terms of both the method of access and the features.
"It will always be ice cream, but there will be many different flavors," he said.
Citi is experimenting with multiple mobile banking and payment applications in this country. Mr. Kietz made several references to the growing preference in the United States for browser-based mobile banking services, though he stopped short of saying that Citi plans to offer one here to complement its downloadable application that resides on users' phones, introduced in April of last year.
He cited research from TowerGroup, the independent research firm owned by MasterCard Inc., showing that 3 million U.S. consumers are using mobile banking services offered through phone browsers, but fewer than 200,000 are using a downloadable application. (A large portion of the browser users are customers of Bank of America Corp., which has said that more than a million customers are using its browser-based service.)
"The market is giving us feedback," about consumers' usage habits, Mr. Kietz said, and clear support for the browser model is "defining mobile banking in the U.S. in the near term."
Other developed countries with advanced wireless networks — such as Australia, Singapore, Japan, and Korea — are likely to be better candidates for browser-based services, while nations in the developing world — such as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia — are likely to be better prospects for text banking.
In Japan, more people go on the Internet from mobile devices than from computers, Mr. Kietz said.
"The common wisdom is that what is happening in Japan today is going to be happening in the developed world two years from now," he said. "There are going to be more, cool phones available, and use of the mobile browser is going to increase substantially."
Citi's global mobile rollout shows a diversity of approaches, and Mr. Kietz said the strategy reflects the varied markets that it serves. Mobile Money Ventures announced last month that Citibank Hong Kong would be the first customer for its mobile service, using a browser to offer banking software that will run on Citi's servers.
By contrast, when Citi introduced mobile banking in the Philippines, it focused on text messages because the island nation is often described as the "text capital of the world," he said. "Around the world, it's going to be based on what kind of phones people have and how they use them."
