Now that mobile banking services have been available to consumers for a few months, some companies are starting to promote the technology as a corporate cash management tool.
Bankers say the technology could help businesses, especially small ones, manage their money, but the bankers also concede that mobile banking is so new that it is still unclear what types of companies may make use of it, or how.
Wells Fargo & Co. staked an early claim in the mobile business banking market by announcing last week that it has developed its CEO Mobile service. The San Francisco company said its service is the first to let customers access corporate accounts through personal digital assistants and mobile phones.
Megan Minich, who leads the mobile technologies team in Wells' wholesale Internet and treasury solutions unit, said it can send important intraday information, such as account balances and alerts, to mobile devices, and that the company is planning to add other capabilities in the coming months.
Wells says it knows what features it plans to add this year, but its plans for after that have not been determined.
The company will focus on what corporate customers "want to see and how they want to see it," Ms. Minich said in an interview this week.
"Making something that's usable and simple is critical," she said. Determining "which accounts they even want to access through this device — that's an important preference setting."
In the months ahead Wells plans to let financial managers perform administrative duties, such as password resets; to approve wire transactions involving dual control, where a staff member initiates a wire transfer but a manager must approve it before the bank executes it; and to view exception items, such as checks presented for payment that do not match the positive-pay file that the company sent to the bank.
Wells began testing the alert features at the end of last month with a small group of clients. The features are not generally available now, and Ms. Minich would not say when they will be, though the company is "continuing to grow that group."
Nor would she say when the additional capabilities would be available, or in what order they would be introduced, except to say the initial suite of extra features would be introduced this year. "We're looking to be as aggressive as we can."
And, some common treasury management services that are typically available through workstations — such as accessing numerous check images from a lockbox unit — may never translate to the small screen of a handheld device, Ms. Minich said.
Wells does not plan to charge business customers an additional fee for accessing their accounts over a mobile device, though regular banking fees will still apply, and mobile carriers levy data fees, she said. "We don't charge today for a customer to walk into a branch. We won't charge for accessing information over a mobile device."
Bank of America Corp. also is offering businesses mobile banking, but it is not specialized for businesses and does not include cash management. The Charlotte company said this week that the mobile service it introduced in February was available to all its online banking customers.
Leonard J. Heckwolf, the innovation and development executive in B of A's global treasury services unit, said the service works with all its accounts, consumer and corporate, though his company has been promoting it more as a retail service.
"We have an enterprise view, not a retail or commercial segmented sort of view," Mr. Heckwolf said.
Bank of America offers alerts, balance inquiries, and transfers of funds among B of A accounts, though not to accounts with other financial companies, Mr. Heckwolf said.
"Our initial focus on this is the small business and business treasury" markets, instead of larger, more sophisticated companies, he said. Bank of America also is conducting "voice of the customer" research to determine what services those companies might be interested in using, though it is still too soon to discuss the results, he said.
"They were still unsettled on the value proposition for customers who have dozens or hundreds or thousands of accounts," Mr. Heckwolf said.
"In 30 or 60 days I could give you a better idea."
He predicted that Bank of America would introduce business-oriented capabilities for mobile devices roughly every six months for at least the next two years.
David C. Robertson, a partner at Treasury Strategies Inc., a Chicago consulting firm for banks, corporations, government agencies, and nonprofits, said that mobile banking services have arrived so rapidly that the market has not had a chance to figure out the best way to use them.
"The open question is how many people want to take advantage of this," Mr. Robertson said.
Small and midsize companies may represent the best opportunities for banks to sell mobile services, he said. "At the high end of the market, there's enough staff with enough backup" to handle financial chores at their regular treasury workstations.
"As you move down-market, where there's less functional staff and less backup, that may be where these capabilities would come into play."
Citigroup Inc. said it too is offering mobile banking for businesses. In February it announced a global phone remittance service with the British wireless operator Vodafone Group PLC in markets such as Kenya, Poland, and India. That service has since been expanded through other carriers into places such as Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Though phone remittances typically are viewed as person-to-person transactions, a Citi spokeswoman noted that this service is provided through the company's global transaction services unit, an arm of its corporate and investment bank.
