The roll-out of mobile banking products for corporates is high on the agenda for most banks, but lack of in-house knowledge and budgets is inhibiting the industry's ability to go to market, according to research conducted by the bank-backed Mobey Forum
Each and everyone of the 79 banks surveyed by the Mobey Forum confirmed their desire to offer mobile corporate banking services, with some 80% intending to introduce these services to corporate customers within the next 12 months.
Yet despite the bold intentions, respondents cited difficulty in identifying use cases, coupled with a lack of in-house knowledge and budget, as key barriers to roll-out, together with anxieties about identifying across-the-board apps that would drive service uptake across their account base.
“The world is changing rapidly and the pressure on corporate finance departments to keep pace with enterprise mobility is growing,” comments Petra Bunschoten, chair of the Mobile Corporate Banking Workgroup at Mobey Forum and principal consultant at ING Netherlands. “This is a real opportunity for banks, as long as they can optimise their services for the range of different mobile environments in use today. The holy grail lies in their ability to provide a consistent and convenient corporate banking service experience across all devices, from anywhere and at any time.”
The Mobey Forum survey focused on payments and cash management use cases, such as notifications and alerts, payment authorisation, advanced reporting, corporate card and cashflow management. Additionally, the study acknowledges that, given time, the market opportunity could become much wider than this, incorporating treasury dashboards and foreign exchange services, for example.
“The quick and dirty way to offer mobile corporate services is for banks simply to mirror their web-based corporate solution on the mobile channel,” adds Bunschoten. “But this strategy disregards the most obvious opportunities for the mobile channel to add value, through connectivity, flexibility and the possibility to work on the go. Today’s financial executives work from various places and need to be in control; they decide whether to use a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device. Banks must deliver services that not only accommodate this shift in working style, but help customers to maximise its efficacy.”