By John Ginovsky
Mobile banking today is where
online banking was about ten years ago, but its development is accelerating
rapidly. Following a lukewarm start with software vendors three years ago, BBVA
Compass bit the bullet and brought its mobile banking entirely in-house. Now
it's rolled out updated apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry and has
plans to steadily increase functionality. The bank estimates that 20% of its
customers use its mobile apps.
In this first of two parts, Tech
Topics talked with Alex Carriles, executive vice-president of Mobile Strategy
and Retail Innovation at BBVA Compass.
Tech Topics: When did you first enter the mobile channel?
Alex Carriles: We started mobile banking in BBVA Compass back in
2009. We started like most banks with a simple text message where you'd text
the word "balance" to get your balance. If you tried to do anything beyond
that, it was not for the faint of heart...For example, for a transfer, you'd hit
XXR space, name, the money you want to transfer, and the other account number.
You would be likely to end up transferring $211,234, which really was your
account number.
We eventually went to an iPhone
app. For us, we knew it was only the beginning, that iPhone 1.0
application...This year we are rolling out our 2.0 apps, the second generation.
It's not a little revamped, it's a radical change from what our old apps were,
but it's where the market is right now. We're focusing not only on the fact
that we're adding functionality but we are really changing the experience. We
want customers to enjoy their mobile banking.
TT: Do you get a lot of customer feedback?
Carriles: We do, particularly with the app ratings. We were reading
that customers were having trouble with our first generation because of the
lack of functionality. The functionality has to be tied to back-office
services, so it's not only doing the front-end applications. They need to be
connected to some available process behind the scenes.
We realized early on that this was
a market that was going to be moving extremely fast. We needed to be prepared.
In our case we realized how hard it had been to launch our 1.0 apps with some
of the vendor relationships we had. So we decided to bite the bullet and bring
everything in house.
TT: That took a lot of courage.
Carriles: Yes. It had its costs. For example, throughout 2011 we
didn't add any changes to our existing apps because we were building all of the
infrastructure to support our second generation. Once we had that second
generation, we just started creating those apps and adding functionality like
there was no tomorrow. This year in the first six months we already launched
the upgraded iPhone app, as well as the iPad and the Android app. We added bill
payment that we didn't have before, and transaction images, such as cash flow
in a time-graphic pie chart.
We added something that was a first
with us, and we are extremely proud of it-we're the first bank to allow
stand-alone enrollment. For the majority of banks you have to be an online
banking user in order to sign up for mobile banking. A traditional banker might
not see anything wrong with that. When you see it from our side of the
industry, as a technologist, you really wonder why they are requesting that. To
put it in banker's terms, it's almost like asking the customer to go to a
teller to get a ticket to use the ATM...We felt there had to be a good chunk of
users that wanted to become mobile customers but who were not online banking
users.
Next
week: Differences between iPhone, Android, and Blackberry mobile banking
customers.
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About the Author
John Ginovsky is contributing editor of ABA Banking Journal and editor of the publication's TechTopics e-newsletter.
For more than two decades he has written about the commercial
banking industry. In particular, he's specialized in the
technological side of banking and how it relates to the
actual business of banking. He previously was senior editor
for Community Banker magazine (which merged with ABA Banking Journal) and was a staff writer for ABA's Bankers News. You can email him at
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[This article was posted on July 30, 2012, on the website of ABA Banking Journal, www.ababj.com.]
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