IT Developments To Push M-Banking Into New Services

Various technology and banking analysts have identified mobile banking as a hot area for new and expanded information-technology investment, with Ovum and Celent, for example, both placing mobile high on their list of bank IT priorities for the next year.

As the channel matures, new developments will expand the apps beyond their early role as an information disseminator.

“We’re moving toward a ubiquitous experience across a variety of channels and devices,” says Wayne Busch, a partner at Accenture.

For mobile, that means expanding the device’s use to meld with other touchpoints, he says.

That expansion in mobile functionality is illustrated at institutions such as BECU, the former Boeing Employees Credit Union.

Howie Wu, the Tukwila, Wash.-based financial institution’s vice president of virtual banking, says the next step for the credit union as it expands its digital-banking reach is to move more functions such as person-to-person payments and “actionable alerts” to the mobile channel.

The credit union, which just finished an upgrade of its Apple Inc. iPhone app, is scheduled to finish a similar upgrade to its native Google Inc. Android app by March. Both upgrades followed the credit union’s move to Clairmail from Firethorn after Firethorn discontinued its mobile banking service (see story). BECU said Dec. 13 it is discontinuing its mobile-banking apps for Android and Research in Motion Ltd. Blackberry smartphones at the end of this month as it transitions to Clairmail. “This year, we spent some time redoing what we had already done,” Wu says.

Looking head, BECU hopes to take advantage of alerts, an important tool for financial institutions but one that often is misused. By linking them to transaction options, BECU hopes to use alerts as a relationship-builder, an effort also under way at banks such as Bank of Montreal (see story).

“You don’t want to just send consumers a message about their account and not do anything else. It doesn’t do the user any good,” Wu says.  

BECU is working with Clairmail to develop a series of options, such as account transfers to cover overdrafts or mobile remote deposit capture, that it can directly link from account alerts, Wu says.

The credit union also considers P2P payments to be a consumer-retention tool. In the next year, it will extend CashEdge’s PopMoney to mobile handsets. Web-based P2P payments have gained traction among the credit union’s user base, which includes demographic groups that Wu says are predisposed to P2P’s most common use cases.

“We have a lot of nannies, day-care workers and landlords in the Seattle area who seem to want to get paid their rent through person-to-person payments,” he says. “And from the perspective of putting that on mobile, we want P2P to be as accessible as possible.”

The credit union is not substantially pursuing contactless mobile payments, choosing to wait until a winning tech model emerges. “People are even uncertain about whether (Near Field Communication) is going to be the solution that drives contactless payments,” Wu says. “And there’s also a big issue with merchant adoption.”

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