The Bankwatch

Just when we thought we were getting there with 3G here comes LTE in Japan, the next level.

Its not clear what the individual phone download rate would be, but it will be fast.

DoCoMo To Invest Y300-400bn In LTE Network

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

NTT DoCoMo President Ryuji Yamada

TOKYO (Nikkei)–NTT DoCoMo Inc. (9437) will spend 300-400 billion yen over the next five years to develop LTE (Long Term Evolution), the next-generation high-speed cellular network it plans to launch in the second half of 2010, said President Ryuji Yamada on Tuesday.

“The mobile phone market is entering maturity, but its functionality will keep evolving,” Yamada said during his keynote speech at Global ICT Summit 2009, an event hosted by The Nikkei and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Researched by Nobuyo Henderson

Jim notes the release of the Intuit iPhone app.  Last week we had the Wesabe app released offerring a stronger product and better competition to Mint.

In general it continually amazes be that banks are not leaping on this opportunity for a low cost, high visibility ad for their online services.  Which leads me to todays question de jour for bank executives:

Have you tried an iphone?

If not go to a store immediately and do so.  Whether you buy it or not, you will be left with the impression this is a game changing device, and remember the people who use them are vocal.  Then go talk to someone who does iphone apps and be prepared to be surprised at the cost of entry.

Anyhow, well done Intuit.

Spent lunch with the folks from Monitise Group. Their model is very interesting. While it does not do them justice, you can think of it as a mobile ATM. Their business model integrates into an ATM switch, and allows them to offer while lable mobile banking to Banks, without any technology investment from the Bank.

The Bank gets the benefit of mobile banking for their customers without the hurdle of building another channel.

Monitise Group | Welcome

A key principle of the Monitise proposition is to facilitate a non-disruptive business model – we call it the ‘ecosystem’ – which brings together financial institutions, mobile carriers, payments networks and billers into one mutually beneficial environment. This offers a low-risk, highly scalable approach to mobile banking, leveraging the trusted infrastructure of the ATM switch to create a seamless link between consumers’ mobile handsets and their bank accounts

One of the aspects that is interesting to me, and no-one has done yet, is to consider all the aspects of the Banks’ service that is visible at the ATM including targetted advertising. For example if the Bank is offerring an overdraft service to a particular client, that offer could appear at the right place on their phone.

Their business model is attractive to Banks’ and in fact might even make the Bank money.

The ability to generate revenue from merchant services, such as pre-pay account top-ups

Lastly on security, this has been a prime focus, to ensure all aspects are covered.

We have also forged a unique relationship with mobile carriers, which enable them to verify that a request has been initiated by one of their customers. Finally Monitise employs bank grade and world class encryption mechanisms to ensure the safe transmission of information from a customer, across their mobile service provider to their bank and vice-a-versa.

Worth the look, and curious about any views out there given the mixed messages in North America certainly on mobile.

Juniper Research are predicting a 10 fold increase in the numbers using mobile banking, by 2011.

Courtesy of finextra.

Finextra: Mobile banking numbers to pass 800 million by 2011 – Juniper

The number of people accessing banking services via their mobile phones is set to soar to 816 million by 2011 – a ten fold increase on 2007, according to a global study by analyst house Juniper Research

In a related point there was a discussion today on twitter about an apparent drop in use of online banking reported by Comscore, and how this could be [speculation] contributed to by mobile use, use of aggregators (Mint, Wesabe etc) or account alerts.

Interesting take on mobile alerts. Uptake is relatively small at 24%, and of those almost all are via email. Mobile alerts are almost non-existent.

The reason is that the alerts have not addressed what customers actually want, and they resist paying the mobile fees for alerts they don’t want. Time to rethink ‘mobile strategy’ and ‘account alert strategy’ for most Banks.

Interest in Text Alerts Waning – 02.01.2008 – Bank Technology News Article

What banks can do better at, says Forrester analyst Brad Strothkamp, is to give customers alerts to activities they can’t discover through other channels, such as such as out-of-sequence checks or a non-cleared item. “Mobile alerts for balances, payments and other account events are not enough of a benefit to users to push them over the inherent obstacles of the mobile channel, which include cost, setup and lack of an interest for immediate information,” says Strothkamp.