U.S. Bancorp, one of the first financial institutions to offer mobile fraud alerts to credit card customers three years ago, has expanded its alert program to ATM and debit card holders.
These alerts are part of a larger effort by the bank to provide customers with near-real-time financial tracking.
“This streamlines a number of processes for the consumer,” says Dominic Venturo, U.S. Bank chief innovation officer, noting the service can be useful in cases such as expense management and fraud mitigation. “It’s in a broad context of making the mobile device a place to go to get information about an account.”
The alerts are designed to draw attention to and quickly resolve fraud issues and to report on ATM withdrawals and other debit and check transactions. They are delivered via SMS text message, email or both. The bank creates the content internally and configures it for and delivers it to various telecommunication carriers.
To help detect fraud, the new alerts notify cardholders when the bank detects suspicious or irregular activity. For instance, if a consumer in Westport, Conn., gets an alert about a transaction on his card made at a winery in Moldova, he can immediately text to cancel the transaction. The mobile channel lets the consumer verify his identity or confirm a transaction much faster than he could through manual or phone-based verifications.
To help manage budgets, a customer can elect to be notified via a mobile alert when a transaction meets or exceeds a predetermined amount, such as a monthly food budget. Cardholders also may receive alerts for international transactions, gasoline purchases, ATM withdrawals, declined transactions, or for online, mail-order or telephone transactions where the card is not present.
“The alerts are set to meet a certain criteria,” Venturo says. “I may want to be notified of any transaction over a certain dollar amount, any card not present transaction or any ATM transaction.”
Cardholders enroll via the bank’s Web banking site by specifying the alerts they want to receive on each account, and then choose the channel. The alerts are free from the bank but are subject to message and data rates from the customer’s wireless carrier.
The new alerts are part of a strategy by U.S. Bank to build out mobile-enabled services over the next few years. Among its other initiatives is a mobile shopping concierge, which will match a mobile handset’s location-based technology to coupons sent to the phone.
Besides being a mobile-alert pioneer, U.S. Bank was an early test bank for separate Near Field Communication pilots offered by both Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide in 2009. And in the past year, it has added myriad functions to its mobile-payments suite, including a MicroSD pilot with DeviceFidelity, FIS and Monitise, and the launch of a full suite mobile-banking product with bill-pay capabilities (
And by offering alerts in “real time” (actually a few moments), the bank is playing on the front lines of the transaction alert battle, joining banks such as Bank of Montreal, which in June introduced a free alert service that works across all channels to help consumers track personal expenditures.
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