All things considered, what’s a key innovation that’s enabling today’s leaders to overcome this obstacle and deliver new value in mobile banking? Three words: Native Application Messaging. The term comprises push notifications and an in-app message center which enrich mobile banking for both consumers and institutions.

Javelin Strategy & Research’s Mark Schwanhausser clearly summarizes the urgency for financial institutions to adopt mobile features such as Native Application Messaging:

“Consumers are jumping ahead in their use of apps and alerts to manage their personal, professional and financial lives. If banks don’t buy into the era of interactive finance, they will miss out.”

Standout reasons to adopt Native Application Messaging:

1. Meet customers’ new mobile demands. Today’s mobile users are now more discerning than ever. If an app isn’t providing value, there’s a high probability that they’ll delete it for good. Native Application Messaging answers your customers’ demands for more rapid, safe, and on-demand mobile services—ensuring relevance to the new generation of banking customers.

2. Regain product share. Financial institutions are losing their product share to competition both inside and outside the banking industry. To meet current mobile trends, institutions must create a consistent connection with customers’ new favorite channels—their smartphones and tablets. By leveraging push notifications to send alerts and offers to mobile banking users, institutions can be top-of–mind for all of their customers’ banking needs.

3. Elevate safety and customer experience. Customers’ account security is paramount. As opposed to SMS, the mobile feature’s in-app message center serves as a safeguarded inbox, requiring mobile users to authenticate for access to all information that their institution communicates to them. Plus, the feature improves customer experience by providing better account servicing through real-time status and account alerts.

4. Drive costs down. The mobile channel is undoubtedly the cheapest and fastest way to serve your customers. By sending real-time notifications through push and by connecting customers to banking resources through message center, financial institutions can foster more mobile transactions to drive down operational costs and reduce cost-to-serve.

5. Generate new revenue opportunities. According to Pew Research, the two most active demographics in mobile banking are Generation X and Y. Yet, these groups own the fewest banking products of any customer segment. By opening communication to the mobile channel, banks and credit unions can utilize in-app messages to gain ad space for marketing, cross-selling, and promotional content—helping to drive top-line revenue growth.

Learn how this feature delivers value to your mobile app in the form of increased revenue, cost-savings, better engagement, and optimal security through our most recent webinar Native Application Messaging – The Next Evolution in Mobile Banking. To view the Webinar video recording click the play button below.

The post Top 5 Reasons Why Financial Institutions Should Embrace Push Messaging appeared first on mFoundry.

How big is the opportunity in P2P? So big that if you miss it, your customers—particularly younger, more mobile-savvy consumers—will go elsewhere.

Consider this: First Annapolis Consulting anticipates P2P payments to grow to an $80 to $120 billion market opportunity. A good percentage of that will come from your fastest growing demographics: GenXers (1965-1980) and GenYers (1980-1994).

Now also consider The Wall Street Journal’s lengthy mobile story on Tuesday, Feb. 12: “Nearly half of smartphone users who switched banks said that mobile banking was an important factor in their decision, up from 7% in 2010, according to an AlixPartners survey.”

Mobile P2P – The Next Big Thing

In fact, only 16 of the top 100 banks in the U.S. offer mobile P2P today, according to First Annapolis. But because of the proliferation of mobile devices and the rapid adoption of mobile banking, Javelin predicts the mobile channel is the next frontier for P2P payments and expects 60 million American households to be using P2P payments by 2014.

mFoundry understands this enormous opportunity. In October, mFoundry partnered with Dwolla to create a mobile P2P app that the offers low-cost money transfer services to financial institutions and their consumers. The state of Iowa also understands this opportunity and has entered a partnership with Dwolla to offer their residents a new way to pay their taxes. The solution makes perfect for both taxpayers and government: P2P is safe, secure, easy to implement and low cost.

Dwolla is a cash based payment network that allows its users to send and receive cash via their P2P payment platform. What sets Dwolla apart is its FiSync technology, which allows for real-time transfers at a fraction of the cost of its competitors. Any transactions over $10 is charged $0.25 and any transaction under $10 is free of charge.

“P2P has become a customer experience and retention play. It’s almost a must-have. This is the race we’re in. Customer expectations keep rising. [...] Not doing so is no longer an option, the cost of not doing something is greater than the cost of doing something.”

-Niti Badarinath, SVP and Head of Mobile Banking, U.S. Bank

Register for the Webinar

Learn more about Mobile P2P and how mFoundry’s Service Provider Network can help your financial institution engage consumers who live and think mobile.

On Wednesday, February 20 at 11 am PT./2 PM ET, join mFoundry’s Strategic Alliances Manager Walt Cox and Nicole Cook, Business Development Builder of Dwolla for webinar, Mobile Peer-to-Peer: The Next Big Revenue Opportunity. Nicole and Walt will discuss why mobile P2P is critical to staying relevant, growing revenue and creating customer satisfaction.

Register Here

***Space is limited to the first 100 attendees for this Webinar!

The post Why You Can’t Afford To Miss Mobile P2P appeared first on mFoundry.

I asked the prospect to be more specific. He answered that he wanted to “gamify” his mobile solution. That wasn’t very helpful—same word, different suffix.

For those of you who don’t know, gamification is defined as “the use of game mechanics and game design techniques in non-game contexts.” It’s currently all the rage in marketing circles, despite the fact that the premise has existed for years in frequent flyer programs, credit card rewards, and other point-based schemes. It just has a nifty name now.

The most visible example of gamification is the social network Foursquare. It allows people to “check-in” at various locations, collect merit badges along the way and, if you are a really lucky (rabid) person, you could become “mayor” of that particular establishment.

The gamification premise is that a company or brand can add gaming elements to their customer experience to increase engagement and, ultimately, sales. Typical gamification applications include:

• Achievements and Badges
• Leader Boards
• Progress Bars
• Currency
• Challenges

The whole concept has turned into an industry of sorts, with consultants extolling the virtues of using gamification techniques in small and mid-size businesses. Not surprisingly, marketers are faced by yet another digital concept that they may have to implement.

To Game – Or Not

While there are probably some very valuable reasons to consider gamification in a mobile application, it’s important to remember that it’s not a panacea for customer engagement.

A company like Foursquare pulled off gamification because the entire business was predicated upon the concept from the get-go. That’s not the case for most businesses, and that’s one of the biggest risks of blindly adopting gamification techniques.

More to the point, I bet most companies experimenting with gamification will turn out ham-fisted, clumsy executions that will leave consumers indifferent to the brand, or worse, resentful of wasted time.

The second big risk is that gamification is so out of context for most brands (e.g. Banking is fun! You paid your mortgage, so here’s a badge!), that it smacks more of manipulation than it does of real value creation.

I know the goal is to keep people engaged with your brand, but as Errant Signal eloquently put it, “Users staying minutes longer doesn’t mean that users were more engaged.”

Ironically, the poster child of gamification, Foursquare, upon facing sluggish growth, opted out of the gamified “check-in” technique and focused more on delivering a valuable, interactive city guide to more passive users. The result? Accelerating growth.

Yes, that’s right. If you deliver a useful, valuable product, you will see actual growth irrespective of any gamification techniques.

For banks and credit unions, we believe this is an important lesson here. Continue to focus on delivering real-time connectivity to, and interactivity with, your customer’s money. That will drive retention, engagement, and more value.

Gamification may have a role, but it’s no substitute for a good product and solid customer experience

The post Gamification or Lame-ification appeared first on mFoundry.

Then I typed Mobile Banking into the Web search box. “About 86,000,000″ results. Wow, that’s really a lot, like nearly three times the results for Mobile Payments. What about News? “About 664,000 results”. Yikes! That’s nearly 10 times the results for Mobile Payments!

So that got me thinking, “Maybe Mobile Banking really is bigger than Mobile Payments?”

I mean, I’ve been thinking that to myself for years, but I don’t really share that kind of heresy with anyone, since it’s kind of mobile sacrilege. After all, the venture world has funded far more mobile payments companies than mobile banking companies, and they can’t be wrong…..right?

But those Google numbers weren’t lying. They were right there in black and white: Mobile Banking has more web and news hits than Mobile Payments. And, using my own tortured, self-serving logic, I postulated that it just has to be true.

So I decided to dig a bit deeper, albeit with my jaded, non-objective bank-loving lens.

Where’s the Money?

Let’s start with the basics. Card issuers are for the most part, banks. That means they are getting paid whenever you use your debit, credit, or prepaid card. If you decide to buy lemonade from an enterprising 10-year-old with a Square account, then the bank makes money there too (not sure about Square, but the bank wins for sure!).

Now, let’s move that card into a murky new world of NFC and smartphones. Same transaction, new form factor. Any new revenue there for the bank? Nope, not that I see. There are, however, a couple of new players in the mix, like carriers, trusted-service-managers, handset manufacturers, et al. I’m pretty sure they’re not working for free, so the bank’s best-case scenario is parity with the past, and the very real possibility of diminished returns for banks.

Any net-new transactions from mobile? Probably not. If there are, they certainly aren’t going to move the needle in any meaningful way.

I suppose that someone could develop something new that completely disintermediates the issuer. That would be bad for the bank.

So, looking at mobile payments, there’s very little net-new revenue, and the likelihood of a reduced position in the market. Well, that’s not very good is it?

And don’t try the line, “We’ll make even more money off of offers.” That is what most of the mobile payments players are now pursuing since they figured out they can’t make any real money from mobile payments.

OK, so, in my myopic world, mobile payments ain’t grand for banks.

So what about mobile banking?

Well, that’s a different story.

The Next Big Cha-ching

We already know that Mobile Banking delivers the following benefits:

• Strengthens Customer Loyalty: Through new account openings, DDA direct deposit and balance increases, we’ve seen an average of an $8 per account annual lift from Mobile Banking.
• Improves Bottom Line Performance: Through decreases in IVR and live agent call volumes, as well as reductions in check writing, we’ve seen an average of $6 annual savings per account through channel efficiency and service gains.
• Drives Top-Line Growth: Through increases in the quantity and value of debit transactions, we’ve seen a $14 average annual revenue lift.

Add all these up and Mobile Banking is more than paying for itself.

But wait, there’s more…

As we ready the launch our new extensible Mobile Banking platform, named Fin.X, we are beginning the process of turbo-charging Mobile Banking.

Our new solution extends our platform to a curated network of third-party service providers who deliver new features better and faster than any bank or credit union could hope to do on its own.

This means more new features and services than any other platform, and more importantly, a far greater opportunity for financial institutions to earn more revenue from Mobile Banking. It also means more opportunity to innovate rapidly and to continually differentiate your institution.

With a starting network of more than 30 companies in its Service Provider Network, mFoundry will extend its platform in coming months to deliver services from the following categories:

Each of these categories delivers top-line revenue or cost savings. Exactly how much can institutions make? In total, there is currently at least $100 of incremental annual per-user revenue that can be earned by our clients.

Will every one of our clients take every feature? Probably not. But they will each take a few, and that will create more revenue opportunities for their financial institution.

The bottom line: The near-term opportunity for issuers will be far richer with Mobile Banking than with Mobile Payments. Of course it’s important to ensure that our clients can defend their card portfolio in mobile, which is why mFoundry supports, and will continue to support, all forms of Mobile Payment.

But, ultimately our clients need to drive more revenue today.

And for that job, the best tool is clearly Mobile Banking.

There’s a chance I may be a bit biased, so please don’t shoot the messenger.

The post Mobile Banking vs. Mobile Payments – What’s Bigger? appeared first on mFoundry.

Source: Engadget

A few clients asked recently about our POV on RIM, and whether it’s worth supporting a Blackberry application or not. Over the past year, we’ve had a variety of posts on the topic. The short answer is, “No.” It’s no longer worth supporting an app on the RIM platform.

Most of our clients sigh upon hearing this news, comment on the lunacy of RIM’s position, thank me, and then hang up their Android or iPhone smartphone. Interestingly, if you go back a few years, every one of these clients was on a RIM device. They saw firsthand the rapid demise of what was once the dominant smartphone device.

There is no shortage of opinion on what happened to RIM: poor leadership, weak knees, hubris, awful developer tools, limited devices, etc. But, the other day I was attending an industry event and a speaker commented on Clayton Christensen’s seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma.

If you haven’t read it, here’s the two-bit summary. Successful companies fail to innovate because the innovations can kill the existing, profitable business. A classic example of is Kodak missing the boat on digital cameras because film was their core business.

So the speaker at this event kept blathering on, and for some reason, RIM and Apple came to mind.

For RIM, they knew that touchscreen phones were going to show up at some point. In fact, according to various reports, RIM (and Nokia for that matter) had some prototypes with a touchscreen UI well in advance of the iPhone. But, RIM felt that a critical part of their secret sauce was the keyboard that they really pioneered and perfected. For them, adopting a less physical and tactile solution didn’t make sense; it would only dilute their offering.

It turns out that the vast majority of people are just fine with a touchscreen keyboard. Is it as good as the original RIM keyboards? Not by a long shot. But it’s good enough, particularly when weighed against all the other cool stuff you get when you recapture that screen real estate (launching maladjusted birds comes to mind).

Apple’s Genius

Then I thought about Apple and the iPhone. I realized that launching the iPhone was a big bet for Apple on many fronts. Remember that prior to the iPhone, it was the iPod that pretty much single-handedly brought Apple back to the forefront of computing and pushed the company onto the Windows platform with iTunes.

The iPod made Apple cool again. It poured money into their coffers, and it reawakened a whole Windows world to the elements of Apple’s beautiful, usable design.  They owned the music player market and nothing could touch them. New entrants from Microsoft, Dell – you name it – they were wreckage strewn along the road.

In fact, the only threat to Apple’s hegemony was an invisible one in the form of the mobile phone. And this is the most interesting and ballsy part of the Apple decision to make the iPhone: They had to be willing to kill the iPod, since the iPod software would be a key part of any iPhone interface.

Well, the rest is history. iPod sales slowed, stalled, and have begun their decline while iPhone sales increased to the point where just the iPhone franchise alone was worth more than Microsoft – Steve Ballmer infamously laughed at the touchscreen too by the way.

The iPhone effectively killed the iPod.

And then, with Android’s help, it killed the Blackberry.

The post RIM Shot and the Innovator’s Dilemma appeared first on mFoundry.

If Facebook ever hopes to generate material revenues from their mobile application, they recognized that the “core” product must be native, while extended, less used interactions may still rely on web based technologies. Native apps still perform better despite increasing network speeds. Content and other data loads faster since the app has less dependence on downloading user interface presentation assets. The quality of interactions and user gestures are still superior with native apps than HTML5.

While HTML5 is an ‘acceptable’ solution, and it was certainly popular with Facebook users, it is still not as engaging as native. mFoundry has consistently seen this trend continue in financial services as well. mFoundry provides both native apps on iOS and Android, as well as an HTML5 site for any device with a webkit browser. Native application users sign-on more frequently, have longer sessions, and conduct more transactions than their HTML5 counterparts. Additionally, native applications have access to operating system functions, like camera, which is needed for tasks like remote deposit capture.

The post Why Facebook Dropped HTML5 for a Native Application appeared first on mFoundry.

The obvious benefit is to Square for managing to catch the tail of the world’s largest coffee retailer. Starbucks is an awesome force in the industry and the best validation so far of the Square premise.

But more importantly, this, at least to me, seems like the the first real shot across (or into) the bow of the key NFC mobile payment players ISIS and Google.

After all, who wants to be the guy at those places that now has to answer the question of why the biggest, daily use food retailer opted to go with an open loop mobile-enabled payment system that isn’t NFC? I wouldn’t want to answer that question.

Our work with Starbucks is all closed loop, which isn’t that big a threat to the NFC players, although it is slightly embarrassing. But an open loop mobile-enabled payment system that doesn’t need NFC? Well, that is something different altogether.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that Starbucks won’t put NFC terminals into their stores. After all, Starbucks is probably the most technically progressive merchant out there at the moment. But, if the Square system takes off at Starbucks, and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t, then the argument for a complex provisioning method through NFC certainly becomes less attractive and likely.

Put simply, if Starbucks and Square can mint millions of new Pay by Square customers that then can pay at other merchants as well, then NFC becomes a much less valuable, and interesting, play.

So, the NFC ecosystem loses a bit today. Square wins with this contract for sure. Starbucks benefits with another newsworthy payment approach and, most likely, far improved visibility into their customer base. Heck, even bank issuers won a small battle today, as they are the funding sources behind the payment…..at least for now.

The great game is afoot.

The post NFC Takes a Shot In The Belly appeared first on mFoundry.

Rather, we thought that if NFC chips were open enough for non-secure NFC connections, or better yet, reasonably open for credentials storage via the secure element, then there would be a tremendous burst of innovative ideas leveraging the technology.

One of my favorite discoveries was the NFC Gum Ball Machine. It actually doesn’t dispense gum balls, but it lets you put a quarter in a machine, pick an app that you want, and then NFC transmit the app to your phone. The lab at Razorfish Germany put it together and you can see a video demo here.

Kind of silly, but neat too. While it’s not the best idea ever, it is an attempt to push the NFC paradigm into some interesting uses. So why aren’t there thousands of cool NFC apps coming to market right now?

Well, the problem is that there just aren’t enough open NFC phones in-market for developers to exploit. And depending upon how mobile carriers configure their NFC phones, we could get lucky and see a renaissance in mobile connectivity and sharing solutions, or we could be stuck back in the mobile development dark ages.

Anyone remember the early years of GPS? I do……painfully. Back before the iPhone was invented, carriers had a tight grip on access to the GPS chip in a phone. So, if you wanted to use the GPS chip, you had to pay the carrier every single time a user did some sort of GPS request. Carriers used a bit of fear mongering to justify the closed system, citing “huge privacy concerns.” I guess they’ve gotten over those concerns.

Not surprisingly, no developers used the chip and, as expected, mobile innovation languished for years. Enter the iPhone, with its open API for GPS. The good news, is that now just about every app leverages the GPS chip and consumers, developers, carriers, and of course Apple, are the better for it.

So here we are again with the NFC chip and its companion credentials store being held hostage by the carriers. This time they’re not bemoaning privacy concerns and are at least being honest that they want to control mobile payments and commerce for “their” handsets.

The result? Even though NFC has been around for nearly a decade, we only have a handful of phones with the technology and plenty of “pilots” for mobile payments. Innovation using NFC is an oxymoron, and we’re left waiting for the technology to emerge open, and unfettered.

How long will we have to wait for the NFC renaissance? Well, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

The post NFC Should Unleash Creativity appeared first on mFoundry.

Are these valid concerns? Is the post-Jobs Apple about to make its first critical blunder? In a word … No.

A change in aspect ratio will certainly have a greater impact than a change in resolution. We’ve seen Apple already make a a change in resolution when they released the retina display on iPhones. The impact to the ecosystem was minor.

Certainly, in comparison, a change in aspect ratio may make it necessary to look at a change in how elements are arranged on the the screen or how the user interacts with the device. If this were to happen, then as developers, we will have a lot more work on our hands.

All that said, I strongly suspect that a 4-inch iPhone will maintain the same aspect ratio. Regardless, even if there is going to be a more drastic change, there will still be fewer target form factors for iOS than those found in the Android ecosystem.

What do you think? Will the “iPhone 5″ be a 4-inch iPhone? Will the larger screen create problems for iOS developers?

(Image Credit: Apple iPhone 5 Mock-Up by DavidMartynHunt / Flickr)

The post Latest iPhone 5 Rumors Suggest 4-Inch Display appeared first on mFoundry.

What? Software colossus Microsoft actually paying developers to build for their platform? Yep, apparently it has come to that. The irony of it all is quite thick, particularly when you think back to Steve Ballmer’s terse dismissal of the new iPhone in 2007.

Well, things have changed and Microsoft is a significant laggard in the mobile operating system race that is dominated by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Even so, they haven’t given up, and their latest Windows Phone operating system is their most aggressive push yet.

In fact, they’re even getting a little help from AT&T and Verizon who are flogging the Windows phones like there’s no tomorrow. Why? Simple. They want to try and stem the stranglehold that Apple and Google have on the smartphone market. After all, who wants to be relegated to the role of a dumb pipe?

Well, given all the hubbub around the Windows Phone OS, I thought it was time to take it for a real test drive. So, I put my iPhone in a drawer, grabbed a Windows Phone 7 device from our QA lab and started the process of setting it up.

While the set-up wasn’t easy, it wasn’t really very hard either. Decent marks for that Microsoft.

The first thing I noticed with the Windows Phone was its superior typography. The way type is designed on the device is really much prettier than what you find on any Android phone, and even nicer than you see on an iPhone. This is quite an achievement for a Microsoft product if you ask me.

The tile metaphor powering the user interface is interesting. The tiles animate, sweeping gracefully across and around the screen. The tile size provide ample space to deliver some limited messaging, which is a nice touch when you just want a tidbit of info.

Moving deeper into the phone, I saw the Windows version of their App Store. I clicked in and saw a variety of promoted apps in the store. Some looked familiar.

I searched for the app we built with Bank of America, and it was there for the taking. I already knew how that worked, so I searched for Pandora instead.

Nothing. Bummer.

I then searched for some of the other apps I use regularly like Instagram.

Nope. More bummed.

I knew that there was a dearth of apps in the store relative to iOS and Android, but I was surprised by how empty I felt not being able to connect to some of the basic apps I apparently find indispensable. At that point, I knew not to look for the other less brand-worthy apps I use on the iPhone. There’s no way they’d be there for me.

Funny, but the lack of apps wasn’t just about not having music or cool photos. Rather, the lack of apps highlighted the biggest problem with an unsupported smartphone: it’s just a phone and e-mail/calendar client. In other words, if you don’t have apps, you might as well be a Blackberry from 5 years ago.

I thought about how much I now do on my smartphone that I didn’t do just a few years ago. I wake up, courtesy of the phone, and immediately check the wind, surf, and tides to see if I’m going to surf before work. If not, I can go to the gym and use the app I have to track workouts. Then a quick look at the weather, followed by my reading the RSS feeds on my phone for industry updates while I buy coffee courtesy of my phone, etc. etc. etc.

Over the past 5 years, my mobile phone has blossomed into this data driven device that keeps me perpetually connected to the things I need and want…..and it’s all courtesy of the apps (and those not-so-dumb pipes I mentioned earlier).

So, of course Microsoft is paying people to develop apps for their OS. They have to because without the apps, their phone is immediately a relic no matter how good the UI, or how fast the data, or how beautiful the delivery.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a purveyor of mobile operating systems at our door looking to pay for app development. The last one was Palm’s WebOS. Sadly, that didn’t work out to well for them.

I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how it works out for Microsoft.

The post Windows Phone: Without Apps, It’s a Piece of… appeared first on mFoundry.