Northern Trust Corp. plans to introduce a mobile banking application next year for institutional money managers and their clients.
The application, which is being developed in-house, first for the Apple Inc. iPhone and then for the Research in Motion Ltd. BlackBerry, should be ready within six months, Geordan L. Capes, a senior vice president in Northern Trust's corporate and institutional services unit, said in an interview Tuesday.
Being designed for a specialized set of customers, the app is less about checking account balances than it is about answering specific financial questions, Capes said after a presentation where Northern Trust executives discussed Passport, the Chicago banking company's asset management portal.
"You can't do all of Passport on that iPhone. You wouldn't want that," Capes said.
Instead, the application is designed to let a money manager determine instantly what kind of securities exposure his portfolio has to a stock, such as Lehman Brothers, which failed last September, or foreign exchange exposure, such as to the Malaysian ringgit, which has been volatile on speculation about government intervention, Capes said.
The application also makes it easy to see, for example, whether a portfolio with exposure to Lehman also has exposure to similar companies such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or Morgan Stanley, he said.
It does this by querying the portfolio's database in the main Passport Web site.
And while the application is not designed to trade stocks, it includes a "my team" button to quickly reach other Passport users, so that a manager can take action immediately without closing the application, said Griff Ehrenstrom, the director of C&IS consulting in Northern Trust's corporate and institutional services unit.
Northern Trust may introduce some transactional features to the application in the future, for instance allowing a financial executive to approve a wire transfer from the iPhone, Ehrenstrom said.
Adding such capabilities will likely involve the use of a security token or multifactor authentication system, he said.
