Following many other aspects of treasury management, banking for traveling treasurers hits the road.
Over the years, treasury management has become more mobile, but mobile banking for corporates has never really caught on. And even though for consumers mobile banking is fairly routine and there is a movement (although embryonic) for more mobility in treasury management itself (witness Wall Street System’s Treasury on the Move), mobile banking for treasurers has been dead in the water. Yet a new survey has revealed that corporations are ready for it and want it.
According to the just-released survey, put together by bank software company Fundtech and consultancy Aite Group, there is a “high demand” among corporate treasurers for mobile banking services, with almost two-thirds of businesses at least “somewhat likely” to use mobile corporate banking services to perform basic transactions such as checking balances or transferring funds. But 55 percent of treasurers would like to do more than that, and have the capability to do payments, invoicing and approvals and the like.
Up until now any mobile banking for corporates that did exist was known as SMS banking, which were basically just text messages. But Fundtech is looking to go beyond this by launching a mobile banking platform for smart phones and tablets called Mobile ACCESSplus, that offers a more robust interface for doing much more than just taking a look at what’s happening and sending instructions to someone else to execute. The new platform allows a treasurer to “take action” vs. just seeing the information in a read-only format, said George Ravich, Fundtech’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. If the technology lives up to its promise, this will be good for corporate treasury as it will help eliminate bottlenecks that can form when someone with the proper authority is traveling or otherwise not immediately available.
Fundtech said the new mobile platform is an extension of Fundtech’s “Services Platform,” which is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach that brings together all of Fundtech’s transaction banking products into an suite of SOA services including payments, cash management, financial messaging, and “financial supply chain.” The new platform will be compatible with all mobile operating systems, including Apple, Blackberry, Android and Microsoft.
The platform will be sold to banks to offer to their corporate clients, so pricing for the platform will vary from bank to bank and, perhaps, depend on the level of the corporate-bank relationship. Fundtech said it already has one large UK bank as a customer.
Although Fundtech said its new platform is the first of its kind “designed specifically for corporate electronic banking,” there is at least one other player in the market, and that is Infosys, which recently launched Finacle Mobile Banking 2.0. Although the two products share some attributes, it is not entirely clear yet how they compare. International Treasurer will explore this more in the coming days.