BOSTON — For Citigroup Inc., more is better when it comes to mobile banking.
The New York banking company is offering, testing, or developing four mobile applications in this country and says that, though it is not certain which of these will take off with consumers, the multipronged approach will ensure that Citi has something to offer when mainstream consumers are ready to bank by phone.
Citi is also developing ways to deliver these mobile services as both individual products and bundled offerings, in an effort to create a diverse product line.
Steven Kietz, the business manager for Citi's e-commerce unit, said the company is planning to combine the person-to-person money-transfer system it is testing from Obopay Inc. with several other mobile banking capabilities it is developing through its Mobile Money Ventures LLC joint venture with the South Korean wireless carrier SK Telecom Co. Ltd.
Citi has been testing Obopay's mobile-transfer software since last year with its checking account customers and will continue to offer it as a stand-alone service, said Mr. Kietz, who is also the chief executive of Mobile Money Ventures. "I think the target market for that product is the youth-unbanked-underbanked" cohort, he said, "the target market for the Mobile Money downloadable is someone with a more developed financial history and experience."
Banks often offer multiple versions of some products, he said, each aimed at a different market. For example, "we have three flavors of checking," Mr. Kietz said.
He also said that people with more extensive financial needs — the target market for the bundled offering — are more likely to have a more powerful phone, which would be better suited to running the more complex software that would result from combining Obopay's technology with that of Mobile Money Ventures.
Younger people are more likely to have more basic phones, he said, which fit better with the stand-alone Obopay application.
Citi plans to bundle by yearend the Obopay transfer technology with the Mobile Money Ventures banking software. The joint venture was created in October and is expected to begin testing its software in the second half. By yearend it would also offer the Obopay service internationally; it may later offer it in the United States, Mr. Kietz said in an interview after a mobile-banking panel discussion at the Financial Services Business and Technology Conference here last week, organized by TowerGroup Inc., an independent research unit of MasterCard Inc.
Asia, and especially India, are potential markets for a Mobile Money Ventures service that incorporates Obopay, he said.
(Obopay, a Redwood City, Calif., vendor, already offers a transfer service in the United States and India on its own.)
Besides Mobile Money Ventures and Obopay, Citi has two other services: a mobile banking service using software from mFoundry Inc., and an account management service for credit card customers, using software from Firethorn Holdings LLC, a unit of Qualcomm Inc.
Citi is not the only bank pursuing multiple mobile strategies.
Wachovia Corp., for example, has a mobile banking service using Firethorn software, as well as a version of its Web site designed to be accessible through mobile phone browsers.
"We want to be sure that we're providing the kind of service that our customers expect, particularly in the mobile channel," John Watkins, a Wachovia senior vice president and the online services director for its e-commerce unit, said during the panel discussion at the conference. "Our strategy has been to try some of all of it."
Mr. Watkins said that mobile banking is a key part of the Charlotte banking company's expansion efforts. "We think we can reach online customers on the West Coast faster through mobile, through online, than we can build branches," he said.
Doug Brown, Bank of America Corp.'s senior vice president of e-commerce product development, said that consumers "don't really know what they want. They won't until they start doing it."
The Charlotte bank offers mobile banking through phones' browsers. "Consumer choice wins out in our estimation," he said. "Let the consumer decide."
Virginia Garcia, a research director at TowerGroup, said in a presentation that banks seeking to provide mobile services offerings have to carefully evaluate their goals when deciding what to offer.
"It's not just about 'me too,' about what the guy down the street has," she said. "Mobile banking is a lot more than just another channel."
Though large banks have taken the lead in this business, she predicted that mobile banking providers would partner with core banking software providers, making the services more widely available to smaller financial companies.
"This, I feel, is going to be a catalyst of widespread adoption of mobile banking in the next six months," Ms. Garcia said.
It's notable, that banks are investing in mobile offerings when the industry is restraining its spending. "Budgets are tight, mobile banking is on fire," she said. "The credit crisis doesn't stop demographic shifts."
