top-10 U.S banks

Mobile Banking Deployments at the Top-10 U.S. Banks

By Brandon McGee on August 1, 2007 12:54 PM

Let me take just a second to thank Jim Bruene and the folks at Mobile Money & Banking for the opportunity to be a guest blogger. During the last 15 years I’ve held a variety of positions with financial institutions ranging from IFCU, a $100 million credit union, to National City Bank, the 11th largest U.S. bank. Currently, I'm vice president & senior product manager (Mobile Banking) for The Huntington National Bank.

Now, down to business. Whether you buy into the hype or not, mobile banking is one of the hottest topics in the financial industry today. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of financial institutions trying to decide what, how, and when to adopt mobile delivery. One of the best ways to determine where the market is going is to simply watch the big guys.

So, earlier today as I was updating my personal blog, Mobile Banking, with the recent news about Wells Fargo, I thought it would be a good time to summarize the mobile strategies of the top-10 U.S. banks. The following table includes mobile banking availability and whether they've selected a downloadable app (Rich UX), a mobile website (WAP), and/or text-message solutions (SMS):

Name	Solution/Vendor	Availability
Bank of America	WAP (In-house)	Live
Citi	Rich UX (mFoundry)	Live
Chase	None: Uncommitted	N/A
Wachovia	Rich UX (Firethorn – Coming Soon) & (WAP – Live)
Wells Fargo (Retail)	WAP (In-house)	Live
Wells Fargo (Business)	SMS (Clairmail)	Live
Washington Mutual	Announced WAP	Early 2008
HSBC – U.S. (see note 1)	None: Uncommitted	N/A
SunTrust	Rich UX (Firethorn)	Coming Soon
US Bank	None: Uncommitted	N/A
RBS - U.S. (see note 2)	None: Uncommitted	N/A

Analysis
So, what does all this mean? Not much ... yet. The word on the street is that there are still a lot of announcements pending, and not just from the uncommitted banks. A number of the mega-banks are rumored to be implementing multiple solutions to provide a more robust offering and hedge their bets. The next six months could bring substantial change to the above chart. Stay tuned — it’s going to be a wild ride.

Note:

1. In the United Kingdom, HSBC is charging a fee for mobile delivery. For more information, see my recent Mobile Banking post here.

2. The Monilink website lists RBS as a provider “coming soon” to the United Kingdom.