A growing number of banks have
introduced downloadable applications for Apple’s iPhone in an
effort to boost mobile banking take-up. As Liza Landsman, Citi’s
head of North American consumer internet and mobile banking, tells
Farah Halime, it has gone one step further by rolling out an app
for its credit cardholders.
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Citi,
the fourth-largest US bank by deposits, has extended its free
downloadable iPhone application (app) to its credit card customers,
three years after it became the first major US bank to offer its
customers a downloadable mobile banking app.
By using Citi’s mobile app for the hugely
successful iPhone, cardholders can check account balances and
available credit at any time. The app also provides details on
recent transactions, as well as the date on which the next payment
is due and enhances an app launched by Citi last year for its
retail banking customers.
Cardholders can sign on to the new service
using the same username and password they use to access their
online accounts, boosting user ability.
While Citi was an early advocate of mobile
banking, it has continued to trail behind rival Bank of America’s
(BofA) sector-leading mobile banking customer numbers. Within a
year of the banks launching their respective m-banking offerings in
the summer of 2008, BofA had signed up one million customers
(see RBI 594); by contrast, at
that stage Citi had 20,000.
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By GlobalDataFast-forward 18 months, and BofA has around
3.9 million m-banking customers and more mobile customers than any
other US bank. BoA’s app is also the most downloaded free financial
application on Apple’s iTunes App store, beating rivals JPMorgan
Chase and Wells Fargo.
Citi does not currently disclose mobile
banking user numbers, and does not feature in the Apple top 10 free
downloaded applications, which currently includes: Bank of America;
Chase Mobile (SM); PayPal; Wells Fargo Mobile; Mint.com Personal
Finance; USAA; ExpenseTracker; TaxCaster Mobile; Certify Wallet;
and CNBC Real-Time.
But Liza Landsman, head of North America
consumer internet and mobile at Citi told RBI: “We are
very happy about the early-days uptake of the application but also
sustained usage of the application, which has helped our customers
get access to information in an untethered fashion. We have clear
targets that we have set in the business but that’s not a number
we’re sharing publicly at present.”
Seamless integration across
channels
Although
Landsman acknowledged Citi’s competitors as having done a “terrific
job”, she said the key to Citi’s success is in providing “seamless”
integration across a number of channels.
“The big differentiator [of the Citi app] is
around the tight integration we’ll see across different channels.
Our customers want our channels to work seamlessly together and our
plan as we roll out some of this more enhanced functionality is the
seamless ability to look at data and manage transactions across
channels,” she said.
Citi’s move responds to consumer feedback
requesting the same functionality that already exists to become
ubiquitous across all channels and as “second-nature as going to
the website or calling their call centre,” Landsman added. For the
bank, it also signals a shift away from desktop-based or telephone
banking.
“We acknowledge the very busy lives our
consumers live and sometimes they just need a quick bit of
information. We want to provide one-stop shopping for our customers
in terms of accessing the information on the go,” said
Landsman.
The result of broadening the customer base to
appeal to both retail banking customers and credit card customers
means m-banking has become a pivotal strategy for Citi to grow its
market share.
The m-banking market’s potential is growing
rapidly, with research from Javelin Strategy & Research
forecasting that in five years, 58 percent of all US adults will
use mobile banking. Similarly, a report by Gartner, the IT research
and advisory company, shows worldwide downloads in mobile
application stores, such as Apple’s iTunes store, will surpass 21.6
billion by 2013. Free downloads will account for 87 percent of
downloads by the same year.
2010 is the mobile age
Although recognising the challenge
Citi faces in tapping into the mobile banking market, Landsman
remains optimistic.
“We look at 2010 as the year where mobile in
particular comes of age,” Landsman said.
She added that the rise of the smartphone,
enhanced infrastructure on the network giving more consumers better
and cheaper access to data, signals the arrival of mobile
banking.
Citi’s goal, according to Landsman, is “not to
make customers go some place new to find us, but to be in the
places our customers are already”. Mobile and internet therefore
continue to be areas of focus and growing even more so.
