When the president of City Bank Texas asked his IT team about adding a feature that would allow customers to temporarily disable their debit cards through its mobile banking app, senior vice president and chief technology officer Jim Simpson recalls outwardly smiling at him while inwardly thinking, "Is it even possible?"
But first, the bank wanted to figure out whether the feature would solve a customer pain point. "We listen to the call center first to [determine] how we build innovative solutions," Simpson says.
After getting positive feedback more than a year ago from the unit, the $2 billion-asset bank began working with its mobile banking provider, Malauzai Software, to bring a card control tool to life.
According to Simpson, the IT undertaking was rather simple, minus one end-user decision — to allow or not to allow a spouse to control another card on the account.
The bank floated the question to its operations team, whose vote was divided. Most of the men said they wanted control, while most of the women said, "Heck no," Simpson chuckles. "The most difficult part was solving that. Our solution allows you to only control the card assigned to you."
In January 2012, City Bank Texas released the consumer-facing feature to its 10,000 mobile users. Usage has been solid since deployment.
"We are seeing great numbers," says Simpson, who believes the utility of the feature as coming from the combination of near-real-time text message alerts within the card management tool. Even so, the duties of the bank's call center agents haven't gone away as customers have begun using it. Say a couple in California receives a near-real-time text message alert about a card getting swiped in North Carolina on Sunday evening. They might fire up the app, turn off the card because of the suspicious activity, and call in the case of fraud to the bank on Monday. "We are getting those kinds of case studies," Simpson says.
On/Off Buttons Are Coming
The feature is meant to benefit many types of customers. Some customers prefer to leave their plastic inactive until they are about to swipe. There are parents whose children temporarily hide their wallets under princess palaces. And there are twenty-somethings who throw back one too many dark-and-stormies and neglect to put their debit cards back in their wallets.
Detecting the varied consumer need for more card controls and the potential cost savings for the bank, several financial services companies have quietly launched the feature in recent months.
USAA, an innovation ringleader in the financial services industry, made a card on/off switch available to mobile members in October. Since debuting, it has become the most popular way USAA members temporarily block their debit cards. Media darling startup Simple added the feature in its mobile app in January, while Monitise, a mobile banking and payments provider, said it has deployed a similar capability many times for its clients. "Our experience is that most issuer processing systems don't enable this feature for temporary block/unblock and that is the only constraint that we have in delivering this capability," wrote Carl Tsukahara, chief marketing officer, in an email to BTN.
The concept of temporarily powering down debit cards through the mobile phone has been circulating for several years. Diebold, for example, began selling a card management feature to banks in August of 2011 as part of its MobiTransact mobile banking platform. The tool, called Card Command, lets consumers control their cards via their mobile devices. "Our customers have liked the feature and have incorporated it in a number of ways," says Devon Watson, senior director of software product management at Diebold. "It tends to be embedded with other solutions."
