Mobile financial services remains perhaps the most exciting topic for bankers today says a new report, Innovations in Mobile at Finovate, written by Celent senior vice-president Bart Narter.

Press releases announcing "the next big thing in mobile" are issued almost daily around the world, and many get starry eyed when talking about the size of the mobile market and how mobile is changing the financial services and retail landscapes. Finovate is a conference that features technology start ups, and this year mobile was prominent as a hotbed of innovation in financial services. Celent notes that mobile functionality is differentiated from internet/web functionality in a few important ways. Some observations include:

•    Mobile functionality is location-aware. Smartphones have GPS embedded. Feature phones (less fully capable) are able to determine location, but less accurately, based on which cell phone tower(s) the phone is connected to. In any case, an application can tell where you are and use that to suggest you visit a certain bank branch, ATM, or retailer, depending upon your requirements.

•    Mobile functionality is generally immediate. Sending an SMS message is a near real time event (as opposed to email, which is generally asynchronous). People can check their email with varying frequency, but an SMS message is usually transmitted, received, opened, and read within mere minutes. This can be quite handy for alerts around low balances, overdraft, and suspicious transactions.

•    Mobile functionality can be more action-oriented. Given the immediate nature of mobile, the logical conclusion would be an immediate response to an immediate notification. For example, an alert could say: “You are about to go into overdraft. Would you like to fix that?” Or, “You are two blocks away from your favorite coffee shop. Stop in to get a half price latte.”

•    Mobile is very important. There are over 1 billion mobile internet users globally, and 23% of the time accessing the internet is via mobile, according to Google.

•    Mobile is more for consuming information than entering data. It is far easier to enter information on a PC, which makes it much easier to originate accounts or set up bill pay recipients on a PC than a mobile device.

In this report Celent examines the following firms and their mobile offerings: Bankons; Bill Shrink; Discover and PayPal; eWise; Goal Mine; Kony; Mitek; and Wipro. All have a mobile component. Some are entirely mobile, such as Kony, Mitek, and Wipro.

http://www.celent.com/reports/innovations-mobile-finovate

TrackBack URI for this entry