Though these are similar to the services that many banks now offer consumers, early movers in the mobile business say they have added features geared specifically to the needs of commercial customers, notably the ability to authorize transfers and payments and to receive a variety of account alerts.
The opportunity is significant, analysts say; more than one-third of small businesses said in one recent report that they would be interested in using mobile banking services, but less than 5% are actually doing so because few banks offer them.
This has created such pent-up demand that some banks, after introducing mobile services aimed at small businesses, are seeing usage dwarf initial expectations.
"I think the customers were ready a lot faster than the financial services," said Montressa McMillan, a senior vice president at BB&T Corp. "Banks have been behind, quite frankly, in delivering what the market has been ready for for some time."
The Winston-Salem, N.C., banking company introduced a mobile alert service aimed at businesses in March, using the short-message service, or SMS, that is widely available on handsets. "Within three months of the first launch of SMS, we exceeded our annual target," Ms. McMillan said last week.
BB&T expanded its mobile services for small businesses last month, letting people bank through the browsers available in many phones. By yearend it expects to offer a downloadable "wallet" application using the "triple-play" services that include SMS text-messaging, browsers, and downloadable applications that are offered by the vendors ClairMail Inc. in Novato, Calif., and mFoundry Inc. in Sausalito, Calif.
Ms. McMillan said that mobile banking supplies a way for busy entrepreneurs to stay in touch with their finances. "We feel our small-business clients are much like our retail clients. They don't have much time," she said.
The company is developing mobile services for all its customer segments, she said, and "at every step of the way we had our small-business clients in mind."
Wells Fargo & Co., an early leader in mobile banking, introduced a browser-based mobile service for small businesses in September 2007 and added text-message capabilities a month later. James P. Smith, an executive vice president and the managing head of Wells' Internet services group, said that customer adoption has exceeded the San Francisco company's highest expectations.
"We not only exceeded our 'stretch goal,' which is usually unattainable, we exceeded it by 20%," Mr. Smith said in an interview, though he would not disclose the number of active users.
Wells initially expected small-business customers to use the browser service once or twice a month, he said, and did not even project potential use of the text-message feature; instead, users log in 10 to 11 times a month and send or receive 19 texts.
"These are hyper-engaged customers," he said. "I was skeptical of the text-messaging use case. What we have found is that this is a phenomenally popular feature."
The Boston research and advisory firm Aite Group LLC said in a report published last week that 35% of small businesses would be likely to check balances from a wireless handset but only 4% are doing so, mostly because their financial institutions don't offer the service. One-quarter of the respondents said they would be likely to initiate transfers or to pay bills by phone, it said, but only 2% were making transfers and 1% were paying bills that way.
