Motorola Inc. is trying to make online banking available on U.S. cell phones and personal digital assistants.
The Schaumburg, Ill., company said last week that it has developed a specialized browser-like application that would let people pay bills through mobile devices.
“Whatever you can do online today … we will allow all that to happen on the handset,” said Sarab Sokhey, Motorola’s business development manager.
The M-Wallet Solution can work on several types of phones manufactured by Motorola or other companies, Mr. Sokhey said. However, he also said his company must finalize a deal with a mobile service provider before the software could be offered to consumers. Motorola is in talks with several carriers now, and he expects to have such a deal within three months.
Motorola’s software is designed to connect with the systems used by bill-payment service providers. Payments made with the software would appear on a user’s online bill-payment history on bank’s Web sites. Users could also have bills delivered to their phones and receive an electronic receipt after they are paid.
Mr. Sokhey said Motorola is in “very advanced discussions” with the top bill-payment providers, though he would not name them.
Matt Lewis, an executive vice president and the general manager of electronic commerce for CheckFree Corp., the No. 1 bill-payment company, would not say whether it is working with Motorola. However, he did say his company is testing its own mobile payment product with customers who pay bills through CheckFree’s Web site.
This is not CheckFree’s first experiment with mobile banking, Mr. Lewis said; it introduced a service about four years ago that let people pay bills using cell phone text messages, but the service was dropped a year later.
“That clearly was not the opportunity that consumers were looking for,” he said.
Consumers who use a mobile payment service “will expect and demand that information about that transaction is available to them at their financial institution,” Mr. Lewis said.
David Fortney, a senior vice president and the head of the electronic payment and presentment division at the No. 2 provider, Metavante Corp., would not say whether the subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley Corp. of Milwaukee is talking to Motorola.
Metavante introduced a cell phone bill-payment service in 2000 but quickly discontinued it, he said. “It got very little use. We think the technology was ahead of the consumers.”
But more people have mobile phones today, and some already have their banks send e-mail alerts there, Mr. Fortney said.
“I can’t really speak to whether the consumers are totally” ready to pay bills with their phones, “but clearly it’s worth a try right now,” he said.
Mr. Sokhey said the software can also be used to initiate domestic and international money transfers funded with a checking or credit card account, a prepaid account with a phone carrier, or charged to the customer’s phone bill.
Cell phone banking sessions would be authorized with a PIN, and the software encrypts all financial communications, he said. It will work on any mobile device that uses the Symbian, PocketPC, Palm, J2ME, Brew, or SimTk operating systems.
Some phones Motorola is testing with its employees have contactless payment chips that let people make credit or debit card purchases with a phone instead of an actual card, Mr. Sokhey said.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Visa U.S.A. are testing phones with contactless payment chips at Philips Arena in Atlanta. (The banking company has not said what manufacturer’s phones it is using.)
Morgan Stanley’s Discover Financial Services said in December that it would test a contactless phone payment system this year.
Last year Bank of America Corp.’s BankBoston Brazil began offering its wealthy customers a Nokia Corp. device with a standard Qwerty keyboard with International Business Machines Corp. software designed for online banking.
A spokeswoman for B of A said it does not plan to offer the device to U.S. consumers.
Dan Schatt, a senior analyst for the Boston market research firm Celent Communications LLC, said that people can already use their mobile phones to reach a bank’s call center, but doing that is less convenient than an online service.
“If you can view all of your accounts with a few taps on your phone, without having to call up and enter in a lot of information about yourself and wait on hold, I think that’s definitely an attraction,” Mr. Schatt said.
He expects the Motorola software’s international money-transfer feature to be a big attraction. “You’ve got a demographic of foreign-born individuals that could definitely make use of this.”
In the past phone carriers have been reluctant to enable banking transactions across their lines, because there was little reward for them, Mr. Schatt said.
“Carriers have been the gatekeepers” in this setup, he said. Motorola’s software is “a first step to getting banks and carriers more comfortable with a business model” for a cell phone payment system “that can work for all parties.”
