The number of mobile users are growing at an alarming rate, with a plethora of new mobile devices, mobile Internet services and powerful user interfaces vying for attention and adoption. The mobile web is not just about accessing the Internet from your phone; it’s a revolutionary technology and communication platform transforms our experience of the Web, the world, and ourselves.

Mobile devices are a highly personal extension of the individual, and have unique sociological and technological attributes – they are location aware, temporally situated, and socially connected. In the highly fragmented mobile space, it is increasingly important to offer consumers an elegant and satisfying user experience and mobile services that are intuitive, yet stunning and feature-rich.

However, if we look at mobile banking and the broader mobile industry – How do companies and individual developers create scale? By reaching users with the same products with the same user interfaces that run across hundreds of different types of devices, operating systems and carrier networks?

As the mobile banking experience evolves, it’s not about simply porting the PC experience to a smaller screen – the user experience and business requirements demand that the we create ‘mobile only’ products – services that harness the unique strengths and attributes of the mobile device while negating the limitations of size, memory, speed and processing power.  These value propositions will emerge to differentiate the mobile channel from the online channel and in some cases fulfill on a flicker of opportunity that began on the PC based web.  Examples include the mobile coupons that leverage behavior models, multi-factor authentication leveraging mobile channels or phone based biometrics.
When this type of unique value becomes the norm from the mobile channel, the question of whether to acquire a customer on the mobile first or service them on the mobile second will be irrelevant.

With the completion of MMVs credentializing rollouts in Asia Pac and the US, we are now feeling the constraints of our resources.  As a company, we live to fulfill our profit potential.  As a joint venture, our parent companies are often able to put strategic value ahead of profit.  With this context the venture is clearly moving into a new phase: Growth.

It is an amazing sight to watch your concept grow to a fully functioning company with product and customers for that product.  However it is in this phase when the company needs to prioritize well.  I would often say in the 90s startup days, “everything is a priority”.  I was stupid.

In any business that is experiencing serious growth the key issue is the complexity and number of issues that arise with each value generating opportunity. No business has the resources to execute on everything well and as the business landscape throws curve balls and variety there are limits to business planning and we have to basically go into the plate spinning mode.  Now consider these facts pertaining specifically to joint-venture management.

• Given a finite set of resources, the success of any decision is often predetermined by the ability to make it a priority that will consequently draw sufficient resource to achieve the intended outcome
• Startup managers and especially JV managers spend too much time working on the business rather than in the business
• Priorities differ from daily to monthly and perhaps yearly
• Good priority management will counterbalance a lack of people, dollars or time

In early stage business, the inability to set priorities with respect to deliverable quality, number of people, access to capital and time available, is a massive issue. This is often hampered by the board of management making decisions without consideration to the early venture’s top priority: revenue growth. No matter the perceived quality or strength of the founders or senior management, the requirement for a functional decision-making body at a board level, is a critical piece of the puzzle of how to prioritize. They are the only managers with ability to see the entire picture across company objectives.

The importance of a collegial, industrious, strategically aligned and experiences board only increases with the growth of the venture and greater opportunities.

We’ve launched our second Asian mobile banking implementation with Citi.  A proud moment for our little venture.

June 23, 2009

Mobile Money Ventures Teams With Citibank To Launch First Browser-Based Mobile Banking Offering In The Philippines

Solution Offers Customers Safe and Secure Access to Financial Information

MANILA, PHILIPPINES and SAN FRANCISCO - June 23, 2009 - Mobile Money Ventures, LLC (MMV), a leading global solutions provider of the next generation of mobile financial services, today announced it has teamed up with Citibank to offer the first browser-based mobile banking solution of its kind in the Philippines. Citi Mobile Banking allows customers to securely manage their banking needs from their mobile handsets at any time and from any location.

Customers can check account information, pay bills, and transfer money by accessing the web-based banking platform on their mobile phones. To ensure the highest level of security, MMV’s mobile solution utilizes two-factor authentication. In addition, no financial information is stored on the mobile device.

“Citibank is proud to launch this new and innovative financial service to better serve our customers,” said Sanjiv Vohra, Country Head and Citi Country Officer for the Philippines. “Our customers are increasingly dependent on their mobile devices and MMV’s technology allows Citi to provide customers a way to access their bank accounts and conduct necessary financial transactions conveniently and securely regardless of time or location.”

“We are committed to offering next-generation mobile solutions for financial institutions and have worked closely with Citibank in the Philippines to develop a comprehensive, customizable and secure platform that delivers a rich mobile financial services experience to users,” said Steve Kietz, CEO of Mobile Money Ventures, a joint venture of Citi and SK Telecom.

Citi is focused on driving innovation and making strategic investments in technologies such as mobile banking to create value for its customers and partners. The Philippines offering is the second of several planned by Citi and MMV in Asia. It follows the launch of a mobile financial services offering last year that provided Citibank Hong Kong customers basic banking features as well as Hong Kong stock trading and portfolio management.

Fred Wilson once blogged about the term Net Native. He extended the definition of Internet only web services to Internet only people.  It stuck with me because I truly identified with it.  Throughout the years at Citi, legacy resources and managers fought my drive to turn to the Internet for all business communication (it’s still happening).  My initial and final reaction was incredulity that people where so obtuse and incapable of evolution to not see efficiency and profitability in the Internet. I felt this way until I left the company at the beginning of the year.  If you look at the relative number of staff that are decked against Internet only job descriptions it’s still lopsided to the point that Internet is still defined as an “alternate channel”.  Nice.
So now that we’re staffing up at MMV, we’re up to 18 depending on how you count, I find myself coming back to this historical blog entry. MMV is a net native service for sure and we’re looking for Net Natives to be on the team.  However, I’m finding that my early bias (and lack of my own perspective) veered towards an age cutoff for true Net Natives.  Now the immersion factor is more apparent and more impactful than being born with a silver broadband card.

Our CEO is a good example of Gen X and their need for a Net life as their families, business contacts and friends spread out.  Another phenomenon that I’m seeing more and more of is the Gen Y (my generation according to Straus and Howe, but sometimes I’m defined as the end of Gen X) 30 year old who doesn’t have a Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Blog life.  In fact I keep running into people like this who pay homage to the “Generation pay their bills with…CHECKS, ENVELOPES and STAMPS!  What the fuck man?

So in hiring into our company, we have to quickly weed the “Alternate Channel” managers who are going to know all the right company names, “DoubleClick, Google, Yahoo, Altavista…oh, oops I meant Twitter!”.  We need to make sure these guys are not going around SOMA with their MMV fleeces on, trying to pay with checks.

MMV has just helped Citi launch Citi Mobile for iPhone (a mildly relevant high point given the Citi stock price). This launch however is a good example of one startup partnering with another and both gaining. The application is designed by mFoundry. We made the call to license this app instead of building our own because, well the integration was easier and the user experience is pretty clean.

I’ve often seen startups reticent to partner with other startups, because there’s a pack of wolves mentality. While the competitive vibe and go get ‘em is core to the newco ethos, partnering is a good way to make decisions that short cycle the time to market issue. The partnership has to be relatively low management overhead and provide some tangible value for this to work.

Kudos to Citi, MMV and our partner mFoundry.