MobUser

mFoundry has just been selected as one of Bank Technology News’ 10 Tech Companies to Watch. This is a huge honor in the banking space as it is a respected publication. What is even more awesome is that we are the only mobile company on the list!

The real story of Citi Mobile’s launch in April is not in its bill pay or funds transfer features, but how it’s delivered. Citi’s mobile offering is a downloadable mobile application built through a development toolkit from mFoundry that comes from the bank, rather than within the service container of a carrier’s menu. “Citi has taken a longer, harder look at long-term strategy” TowerGroup’s Bob Egan says, “and they’ve made a decision they want to own the infrastructure.” Most of the major m-banking intros in 2007 have centered around the managed services platform offering of Firethorn Holdings, an Atlanta developer that stoked regional deals with BancorpSouth, Regions, Wachovia and SunTrust Banks with an exclusive platform arrangement with AT&T, the wireless carrier with the largest subscriber base.

But mFoundry, with the Citi Mobile experience as the driver, may be better positioned to land forthcoming deals with national institutions focusing on adaptability for long-term shakeout in the mobile banking space. How will payments be handled? Will the database players shake the business model at some point?

mFoundry’s Spotlight provides control of the endpoint look-and-feel, adaptability to a bank’s online authentication, and has a head start in other key payments areas: it is already developing an integrated contactless payments platform with ViVOtech and has a formal relationship with First Data to handle money movement. “I believe you have to have an open ecosystem,” says mFoundry CEO and co-founder Drew Sievers. Some have likened the mFoundry/Firethorn rivalry as a replay of the Corillian/Digital Insight battle: DI with its plug-n-play templates, and Corillian’s customizable platform that large banks coveted. While the future is far from clear on mobile banking, any future will have to include the ability for a mobile solution to work within the lifetime value cycle of a customer. That’s going to take a major shift in the relationship with telcos. “Banks are moving to reengineer a lot of their architecture for things like SOA,” he says. “They’re not going to want to spend the equivalent of $1,000 a user to get mobile banking people developed as another delivery channel.” – GF

Technorati Tags: Banking, Business, mFoundry, mobile, moblet, mojax, Spotlight