A service Citigroup Inc. plans to introduce next year would let customers use cell phones to make inquiries and initiate transactions.
Citi's chief executive, Charles Prince, talked about the coming CitiMobile service Friday during a presentation to analysts.
"In the first half of next year we're going to begin offering a free service which allows our U.S. retail bank customers to use their cell phones to locate an ATM or a branch, to check their savings or checking balances, to transfer funds, to pay bills, to check their card balance."
"No other bank offers this" to U.S. retail customers, Mr. Prince said.
He gave few other details - such as whether CitiMobile would use mobile phones' browser capabilities to access the company's Web site and whether there would be restrictions on the types and size of transactions that customers could initiate.
Nor did he say how Citi plans to address the security and customer-service issues likely to arise from unreliable cell-phone connections.
Mark Rodgers, a Citi spokes-man, declined to provide further information. "We don't have too much to talk about at this point," he said.
A Bank of America Corp. unit introduced a cell-phone service in Brazil this summer, using a Nokia Corp. handset and custom software instead of the phones' built-in Web browsers. B of A said at the time that it had no plan to introduce a similar service here.
The service uses software developed by International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., to compensate for spotty wireless connections. If the phone is disconnected during a banking session, it stores pending transaction information and automatically reconnects later to complete the session.
Aaron McPherson, a research manager for payments at the Framingham, Mass., research firm Financial Insights Inc., a unit of International Data Group Inc., said the BankBoston Brazil service makes sense - in Brazil.
"It's a case where there's a clear need that's being met, and it's somewhat unique to that region," he said.
IBM says many Brazilians use only their cell phones because of the state of the land-line phone infrastructure.
Mr. McPherson said the consumer cell-phone banking programs that U.S. banks offered years ago "weren't really necessary."
"Personal computers and the Internet are sufficiently available, and most of your banking activities are not that time-sensitive," he said.
As for time-sensitive banking activities, Mr. McPherson suggested checking a balance before making a purchase with a debit card - "but you can use your phone for that just by calling your bank," he said.
Indeed, most of the functions Mr. Prince described last week are already available through banks' automated phone centers.
Dan Schatt, a senior analyst for the Boston market research firm Celent Communications LLC, said that Citi introduced a mobile-phone banking service about five to six years ago. "Back then, the applications were potentially ready but the instruments that allow you to view the applications" - the cell phones - "weren't ready for prime time," Mr. Schatt said.
However, he said, the time may now be right for a Citibank mobile-phone banking service. "The next generation of cell phones is going to be a lot more user-friendly in letting people access the Internet," he said, and the connections are getting faster.
More banks will start offering mobile-phone banking over the next few years, he said, and mobile phones will definitely be ready by 2010.
"The next few cycles of handsets are really going to be a big leap ahead," he said, "and you want to have a service that's ... already up and running by the time people are actually getting a hold of these handsets."
Mr. Schatt said that he has heard that other banks are looking into rolling out their own mobile-phone banking applications next year, though Citi is the only one he knows of that has publicly mentioned its intention to do so.
But Mr. McPherson said future handset designs may not spur demand for such services. "Except for the technology being better, I haven't seen anything change in the marketplace" to indicate that the demand for mobile banking has increased, he said.
