H&R Block Co. is testing a mobile phone alert service consumers can use to manage its Emerald Prepaid card.
The Kansas City, Mo., tax preparer offers the general-purpose Emerald card to people who want to receive their refund payments from the Internal Revenue Service electronically.
There is no way for people to know when the agency will distribute the often eagerly awaited funds, and they sometimes end up calling H&R Block's call center repeatedly to ask if the deposit has cleared.
The software H&R Block is testing, from Monitise Americas LLC, automatically sends people a text message when a deposit is made to the prepaid account. People can also use their phones to make balance inquiries.
"The text message software is a convenience for customers, and a cost savings for us," Kevin Morrison, H&R Block's assistant vice president for card programs, said in an interview Friday. "It frees our customer service lines for other purposes."
He said that H&R Block has been testing the Monitise software with a few dozen employees and people affiliated with the company for the past few months, and expects to begin a larger test with thousands of people this summer.
By next year's tax season the application should be widely available to all of its customers. Transactions initiated with the Emerald cards run across MasterCard Inc.'s network.
Mr. Morrison said that besides receiving tax refunds, many people have their paychecks direct-deposited to their Emerald card accounts. "We see spikes in our call center volume on the day before payday, when people want to see if their paychecks have been deposited," he said, and it's not unusual for people to call several times a night. "Now they will just get a text message" when the funds are available.
Metavante Technologies Inc. processes transactions for the Emerald card, and is one of the owners of Monitise Americas, a Providence, R.I., joint venture with Monitise PLC of London. The text message software was already integrated into the Metavante processing system and using it was an "easy decision," Mr. Morrison said.
Frank G. D'Angelo, a senior executive vice president with Metavante and the president of its payments solutions group, said Monitise is developing other ways to use the software to manage prepaid card accounts, including making account-to-account transfers, viewing mini-statements on a mobile device, and paying bills through Metavante's bill-payment system.
"We are getting to the point where you can use your phone for financial services, anyplace, anywhere, and at any time," said Mr. D'Angelo, who is also the chairman of Monitise Americas.
"We're not too far from that now."
Monitise Americas also has a downloadable application that banks can offer to customers for mobile phone banking services, and said her company has a broad vision of the long-term capabilities of mobile phones.
Though banks' mobile banking services have seen strong adoption to date, Lisa Stanton, Monitise Americas' chief executive, noted that they are still relatively new to the market, and tend to emulate what is available on banks' Web sites.
Monitise expects that people will eventually be able to use their phones for a wide variety of financial services, including person-to-person transfers, expedited bill payments, international remittances, and retail purchases using near-field communication technology. "That's what's really exciting," she said. "Something new you can do with your device."
