Bank: FirstMerit Corp.
Problem: Coming late to mobile banking, FirstMerit need a quick deployment that would connect to its back office.
Solution: Use Web services to link a licensed, out-of-the-box mobile platform.
What FirstMerit Corp.'s own research made starkly clear: How important it was for the $14-billion asset bank, of Akron, Ohio, to deploy mobile banking, and soon.
After adding about $4 billion of deposits and 54 branches when the institution acquired three Chicago-area banks just months apart in 2010, the pressure was on to prove to new and existing customers that FirstMerit was responsive, full-service and feature-rich, despite integration efforts.
"We were hearing from customers that they either wouldn't necessarily consider a bank that didn't have mobile and/or would consider leaving a bank that lacked mobile," says Julie Tutkovics, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at the bank. "Channel preference has a huge dependence on customer loyalty and retention, and mobile is the future for almost 100% of the transactions among certain segments that do banking with us today."
FirstMerit needed a licensed product that could be quickly deployed, providing text banking plus state-of-the-art mobile banking apps for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android-based phones. The solution would need to easily integrate with FirstMerit's core banking system, Fidelity's Systematics.
The bank began meeting with vendors in January. Clairmail, Fiserv's M-Com, mFoundry, Monitise Americas, MShift and Sybase were among the candidates. But FirstMerit chose the M-Com-powered Mobile Money FastTrack, an off-the-shelf version of Fiserv's enterprise-grade Mobile Money system.
FastTrack met FirstMerit's requirements for out-of-the-box features, low-hassle integration, relatively short implementation times and phone app expertise.
The bank felt freed up to ultimately choose a mobile provider different from its core system because of assurances that its internal IT staff could code the linkages, but also that FastTrack could easily accept such programming.
"What it really came down to was our confidence that we would be able to quickly integrate the out-of-the-box M-Com solution into our backend," Tutkovics said. "Fiserv didn't integrate into our back system exactly, but M-Com was very flexible and agnostic. Yet part of the reason we were able to deploy so quickly was that we were able to write our own Web services that connected the systems. So our IT team wrote the Web services — created the middleware, if you will — to meet the Mobile Money requirements."
A set of Web services sends and receives data from the core host.
"This ability to bolt on and create the hookups between the systems to have more choice and variety provides us the opportunity to select partnerships based on best in class, as opposed to selecting partnerships based on what systems have what plugs where, and limiting yourself to just simply what works," Tutkovics said.
M-Com laid out a road map that persuaded FirstMerit that it could easily add mobile features as demands arose.
Implementation took four months. "That's pretty fast for dedicated, licensed software that's integrated into the backend through the Web server," said Erich Litch, division president of Digital Channels at Fiserv.
More than 15 % of FirstMerit's active online banking users have enrolled, as well as over 10% of the bank's total online users since mobile services launched in August.
The solution allows customers to pay bills, transfer funds between FirstMerit accounts, check account balances, view transaction histories and find FirstMerit branches and automated teller machines. The bank plans to enable actionable text alerts before the end of the year, so customers can make text-based account transfers when balances reach minimum thresholds. Mobile banking with similar functionality for businesses is expected by December.
To optimize its chances of successful deployment, Tutkovics said the bank emphasized internal communications and training during the project.
"We identified several hundred mobile champions within the organization before we launched publicly. And we trained them over the course of a month to make sure they were experts, whether it was in the call center, our wealth management group, on the commercial side or in the branch," she said.
FirstMerit had a soft launch with hundreds of staff users, "over 50 staff each for each type of phone, as well as for text banking," Tutkovics said. "And we tapped a couple hundred additional mobile champions in customer-facing roles to make sure we would be more than prepared to answer questions in the event that customers had any."
