CHICAGO Bankers and vendors say they are beginning to develop mobile banking technologies that their corporate clients, and the banks' own employees, can use for treasury functions.
Any significant extension of mobile applications into commercial banking would mark a major turning point, because most of the focus in mobile development has been on the retail side. Though the first trials of any mobile banking and payment systems are only now beginning, bankers say they have begun looking for ways to exploit the technologies to bring in revenue and improve customer service.
Steve M. Ellis, an executive vice president at Wells Fargo & Co. and the chairman of Nacha, the electronic payments association in Herndon, Va., said cash management may offer the best opportunity for banks to develop revenues.
The nascent mobile banking business was a front-burner topic at the Nacha Payments 2007 conference here, with several seminar sessions devoted to its prospects.
One point of distinction between retail customers and commercial customers is their willingness to pay for convenience. Mr. Ellis noted during one session that consumers have typically been given free access to online banking, bill payment, and other services. Business customers are accustomed to paying for banking services, he said, adding, "I think b-to-b, how people extend treasuries, is going to be big business."
Wells already offers some cash management services via mobile devices, such as cell-phone alerts, but Mr. Ellis said technologies are emerging - if not yet ready to be rolled out - to enable much more, such as voice authentication for wire transfers.
"Voice recognition is a lot better than it used to be," he said. "Voice recognition is one thing. Voice authentication is very different."
Mr. Ellis said the crucial issue is finding ways to knit together features that provide services corporate clients would be willing to pay for. "The key is the interaction between text, voice, data, recognition of the phone, combined with everything we do on the back end," he said.
Vendors also are broadening the scope of their offerings. Gresham Computing PLC, a specialist in real-time financial data, entered the mobile fray Wednesday, announcing a mobile banking module for its Clareti Connect product suite and emphasizing its services for both corporate and retail customers.
Andrew Walton-Green, the chief executive of the British software developer, said mobile technologies could enable bank employees to be more productive outside their offices. For instance, a bank relationship manager could enter loan information into a Blackberry or similar mobile device while at a customer's business site and get instant feedback from the bank's automated underwriting systems.
"You can do some very specific one-to-one marketing," Mr. Walton-Green said in an interview, describing a scenario in which a banker is discussing a business person's desire to borrow $28,000 for building supplies.
The system could begin the lending process on the spot, returning information such as, "This guy isn't good for $28,000, but he is good for $23,000 - or $35,000," he said. "You can upsell or downsell. It's not just a yes or no decision."
Snap Financial Corp., a Canadian lender, has been using the technology for 18 months and is processing 5,000 loan applications a month using mobile devices, he said.
"They can close more business because they can sell right in front of the customer," Mr. Walton-Green said.
A spokesman for Snap did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
Still, much of the industry's attention remains on the retail market.
Kevin Dulsky, the general manager of PayPal Mobile, said his company, the payments unit of eBay Inc., is seeing growing transaction volume every week, though he would not disclose a volume number during a seminar.
He predicted that mobile banking would become as popular as Internet banking, or more so.
"Consumers are going to want this technology, and they're going to demand it, and you guys are going to have to figure it out," he told bankers during a roundtable discussion at the conference.
Javelin Strategy and Research of Pleasanton, Calif., predicted in a white paper distributed at the conference that interactive financial messaging from mobile devices would outpace online account access in transaction volume, though without saying how soon. "Technology integration, planning, and design have never been more vital," wrote Jean Garascia, an analyst at the firm.
