The last year has been an interesting one in the mobile banking world, as players that used to lead the pack appeared to struggle and newcomers booked deals that gave them major leverage in the U.S. market. Enter M-Com, which inked a deal to power Fiserv's Mobile Money product line. Nine months after the deal was announced, the integration is all but finished and the team expects to launch pilots in June, with deployments going live in August, says Serge van Dam, head of marketing for M-Com.
The easy availability of mobile banking to Fiserv's 6,000 core processing customers will be a game-changer for the adoption of mobile banking in the U.S., allowing the smallest of institutions to compete in technological sophistication with the large banks that have dominated the mobile banking market for the past several years. M-Com's ASP interface offers small banks point-and-click capability to launch mobile banking that's integrated with their core processing and bill payment systems in a matter of hours. M-Com offers all three access modes: SMS, browser, and downloaded application.
M-Com hails from New Zealand, where it dominates mobile banking. Its deployments down under include a revenue model for mobile banking and the ability to make person-to-person payments among customers of participating banks. Earlier this year Aite Group called out M-Com as one of the mobile banking leaders in the U.S., a position hotly contested by rivals in the mud-slinging competitive landscape. M-Com entered the U.S. market in 2007 when Washington Mutual tapped it as its mobile banking vendor; those customers remain live, vanDam says, adding, "Chase has some big decisions to make about its future."
Aite Group predicts the greatest growth in mobile banking will be found with those vendors that have easy access to the small bank and credit union market, including Fiserv rivals Jack Henry & Associates and Harland Financial Solutions, and that vendor revenue will grow from $13.9 million last year to $26 million this year.
