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After years of evaluating a wide range of mobile-banking applications separately, Citigroup Inc. is starting to link the pieces together, reports CardLine sister publication American Banker. Citi has teamed with at least five technology partners to determine which banking services consumers really want to access with their mobile phones and how to make it happen. The company's separate divisions have been operating on their own, forging their own vendor relationships to develop different mobile tools, according to Marylou Dowd, a senior vice president with Citi Mobile. But in recent months Citi has tried to consolidate its efforts, culminating this summer in a reorganization of its Internet and mobile groups. With mobile banking, "there is a cohesiveness and a cooperation now. … Our goal is truly to bring this together," Dowd says. "The silos have been crumbling, if you will, which is a wonderful thing." Linking applications that have, until now, operated separately likely will make Citi's mobile technology more appealing to customers and tech-savvy prospects, and it could increase retention and potentially attract deposits. A key part of this effort has been realizing the new channel is very different from its closest relative, online banking, Dowd says. "Mobile banking is not a direct duplicate of online banking," she says. "A customer on the go has different needs than a customer sitting in front of the browser." The first tangible result of this unified effort came last week, when Citi updated its mobile-banking application for Apple Inc.'s iPhone. The previous version provided extensive transaction histories for bank accounts but balances only for linked credit card accounts.
