The Bankwatch

What I like about BMO approach is that it immediately works across all handsets. I continue to believe browse based apps that lever HTML 5 will be the winners.

For now they have chosen to go live with this framework. Then when they add new features and functions those will come to all platforms simultaneously.

Bill payment was delayed due to a system wide upgrade. Most interesting though is alerts. Mobile banking needs to be way more than balances and transfers. The ability to lever devices that always with the customer offers greater and new utility that would not be useful on the laptop/web app.

Anyhow, a great start and kudos to the team.

Mobile still gets more attention from Vendors than it does from many banks and this continues to surprise me.  Certainly the large banks have uptake in their mobile offerrings, but it is not stellar growth.  Tower Group recently noted the economic crisis could change that.

Meantime here is another excellent offerring from Fiserv that appears to be geared to help banks get over that hurdle by making the integration of mobile transactional banking and payments easier and faster to implement.

Fiserv

Brookfield Wis., June 1, 2009Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), the leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, today introduced Mobile Money FastTrack™, a straightforward mobile banking solution that can be rapidly deployed by financial institutions. Mobile Money FastTrack, a streamlined version of the flagship Mobile Money^SM solution introduced by Fiserv in 2008, delivers essential mobile banking features within an affordably packaged solution that can be enhanced as the mobile channel matures.

Mobile Money FastTrack can provide “triple play” technology that enables consumers to access their accounts using any of the three primary mobile access modes: mobile browser, SMS (text messaging) or a downloaded application.

The available downloaded application technology also supports mobile banking on high profile devices such as BlackBerry^® smartphones and the Apple® iPhone™.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

I mention ‘transactional’ banking for mobile because at the root of the hurdle for banks is the lack of consumer drive in North America for mobile. I attribute this to North American consumers coming to the mobile space late, but also and importantly, they are already avid online banking users with decent connectivity wherever they require it, which leaves them wondering what more mobile can bring to them.  Questions North Americans ask themselves are how the mobile fits with their current online banking habits.

With the exception of new markets, eg unbanked, banks would do well to help consumers with the answer to that question.  For example inclusion of payments (bills and remittances), account alerts, or tagging expenses while making purchases are the kinds of things that might supplement the users experience.  Note the Fiserv offerring mentioned above has payments included.