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The application store for the Apple Inc. iPhone and iPod Touch is giving financial institutions an easy way to put mobile-banking products and services into the hands of millions of consumers, says John Pizzi, chief operating officer for mobile financial-services provider mFoundry Inc. The Sausalito, Calif.-based company announced Wednesday the availability of its iPhone mobile-banking product for use by financial institutions. Pizzi tells CardLine the application is ready for launch because it sits in the application-store queue waiting for a release date. MFoundry will announce the first bank to use the application in the next couple of weeks, Pizzi says. The application-download totals associated with the iPhone and iPod Touch have turned both devices into "relevant banking devices" because consumers easily can download the mobile-banking application to the devices, Pizzi says. The appliction store has 3,000 applications, and consumers peformed 100 million downloads in the first 60 days after the store's launch, according to a report Apple released this week. "The success of the application download on the iPhone is pretty compelling," Pizzi says. MFoundry's mobile-banking product will offer such basic banking functions as account balances, transaction history, bill payments, funds transfers between accounts, and descriptions of ATM and branch locations. "We're working on the next release of this where we'll take a few more strides," Pizzi says. MFoundry started planning for the iPhone when Apple first marketed the device in 2007, Pizzi says. At the time, applications were not available for the iPhone. "The real issue was when was Apple going to open it up to applications, and when that happened our product-development team got to work," Pizzi says.
