Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Four (or five?) phases of mobile banking

Some time ago, I postulated that bank adoption of mobile banking can be traced through five stages. (Read here). Recently, I saw that Diarmuid Mallon (from Sybase) have reduced the phases to four in his suggested route for banks. (Read here). By carefully studying the two approaches it is actually possible to map the two to each other and then find many similarities in the two models.

Notwithstanding this, my view is that the two models are significantly different. This is because of two fundamentally different ways of looking at the problem. Diarmuid describes the four phases predominantly in terms of how the consumer behaviour will change. It is an approach where the bank takes on the role of educating the consumer to ultimately have access to a sophisticated mobile banking platform. Thus he describes phases starting when (for instance), ".. consumers are fully engaged".

My model (on the other hand) describe a route through the five phases where the bank has to change and all of the internal challenges related to accepting a fundamentally new approach to banking. It is actually not the customer that has to change, but bank management and internal approaches and business processes and this often takes time. If mobile banking were to be launched with a big bang, customers will gladly adopt. It is the structures and processes in the bank that will have difficulty.

It seems to me that we are talking of two fundamentally different models.

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