Not Reinventing The Wheel

OLYMPIA, Wash. - Demand for mobile banking may be growing at a snail's pace, but Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU) is prepared to wait until members are ready.

In the meantime, WSECU isn't going to waste a lot of money on expensive third-party platforms, according to Ben Morales, chief information officer at WSECU, which launched free wireless banking in January (see related story).

Three years ago, WSECU's IT think tank realized that it already had a simple and cost-effective mode for delivering mobile banking: the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) standard for data transfers via the Internet, which the CU was using to facilitate homebanking transaction downloads for Microsoft Money and Quicken users.

"We thought, OFX is secure and mobile," Morales said. "Why don't we leverage OFX and write a banking application that runs on a mobile phone?"

WSECU built a prototype and then sold the intellectual property to a partner, Berkeley, Calif.-based Access Softek, which released the platform last summer. Online Resources of Chantilly, Va., will be the first to distribute the product, called Mobile Finance Manager, said Morales.

"The platform supports all major devices and operating systems and includes multi-factor authentication," he explained. "It's technology-agnostic from an interface perspective, so any financial institution with an OFX server can use it and not change a thing."