Firethorn Holdings LLC, a technology start-up promoting online banking services over wireless devices, has landed its first big partner: CheckFree Corp., the leading service provider in electronic bill payment and presentment.
The Atlanta companies announced an exclusive deal Thursday to offer Firethorn's wireless application to financial companies that use CheckFree for online bill payment. One CheckFree customer is testing the system with a few hundred customers, executives said, and Firethorn expects it to make the service generally available in early 2007.
Matt Lewis, an executive vice president at CheckFree and the general manager of its electronic commerce division, said, "We are not entering into any discussions with any other software providers."
Tripp Rackley, Firethorn's chairman and chief executive, said, "All we're turning on out of the chute is CheckFree," but Firethorn plans to offer its products later to companies other than CheckFree.
In a March survey conducted for CheckFree and Firethorn, MQA Research found that 18% of cell phone customers would definitely use mobile banking services, and 31% more would consider it. Younger customers were more inclined than older ones to adopt the services, and interest was greatest among those in the $25,000-to-$49,000 income bracket.
The data-aggregator Yodlee Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., came out with mobile banking software in October and has said at least one customer will begin using it by January.
Bob Egan, the director of the emerging technologies practice at MasterCard International's TowerGroup in Needham, Mass., said that during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s there was a flurry of interest in wireless banking and bill payment. He called the Firethorn-CheckFree deal "a blast from the past."
Mobile phone hardware and the wireless networks were not up to the task of managing banking services then, but Mr. Egan said that both the devices and the networks are more reliable today.
"This is going to have legs," he said. But he cautioned that customer adoption would probably be slow, because the carriers' names, rather than banks', will likely be used to brand the service, and consumers may not trust their mobile phone carrier as much as they do their bank.
