(Length: 6 pages)

June 21, 2006

Function-Rich Mobile Finance In Europe: Not Ready For Prime Time In Retail Banking

by Martha Bennett

with Cliff Condon

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Today, function-rich mobile banking is very much the territory of early adopters, both on the provider and the customer side. The complexity of the technologies involved means that banks can either offer a number of very basic (mostly SMS-based) services to a large number of customers at reasonable cost, or provide a function-rich offering to an extremely small number of customers at high cost. But this is changing: Mobile devices are not only becoming more powerful, but the level of standardization is increasing, and it will be possible to offer increasingly function-rich mobile financial services to a broad customer base. How quickly this happens depends on how much effort manufacturers and operators make to drive the standardization of devices. In the meantime, there are opportunities to get customers acquainted with mobile finance with more basic offerings, such as account inquiries. Finally, banks must ensure that customers and their requirements remain at the center of all development efforts — otherwise, the industry will head into another round of mobile applications that are costly to develop, deploy, and support, and which will go straight to the scrap heap.

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