Making Mobile Banking Relevant. Small Business. Participants. Moderator. Sponsored By

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1 Participants Making Mobile Banking Relevant to Small Business Michael Cheravitch SVP Small Business Banking, First Merit Bank Michael Coulter Head of Group Measurement, Standard Bank of South Africa Moderator Penny Crosman Editor in Chief, Bank Technology News, SourceMedia Jim Donnelly EVP Machias Savings Bank Kristine Goddard SVP Small Business Banking, Zions Bank As mobile banking has taken hold among consumers, financial institutions are looking to understand how they can translate these services for their small business customers. The benefits align with small business needs: convenience, efficiency, and anywhere, anytime service. But as industry leaders ascertain mobility for this segment, they grapple with questions of security, return on investment, diversity and relevancy. In a roundtable sponsored by AT&T, Meredith Powers of AT&T discussed the issues and opportunities with Michael Cheravitch, senior vice president, Small Business Banking, First Merit Bank; Michael Coulter, head of Standard Bank Group Measurement, Standard Bank of South Africa; Jim Donnelly, executive vice president, Machias Savings Bank; Kristine Goddard, senior vice president, Small Business Banking, Zions Bank; Quincy Miller, executive vice president, Citizens Bank; Bruce Onbirbak, vice president, Business Banking, B of I Federal Bank; and Morne Serfontein, head of PBB Measurement, Standard Bank of South Africa. Penny Crosman of American Banker and Bank Technology News moderated the event, which was hosted by SourceMedia. Sponsored By Quincy Miller EVP Head of Business Banking, Citizens Bank Meredith Powers Advanced Mobility Solutions Marketing, AT&T Bruce Onbirbak VP, Business Banking, B of I Federal Bank An Advertorial Produced by SourceMedia Marketing Service Group American Banker Magazine Morne Serfontein Head of PBB Measurement, Standard Bank of South Africa

2 We are providing everything at the cash management level: Quicken, RDA and RDC, which is remote deposit capture. Bruce Onbirbak Penny Crosman: How do you figure out what the small business customer really want or need in mobile banking apps? Quincy Miller: What we found is, customers are extremely vocal, whether it s on our Facebook page or on your app ratings, they will let you know what they want, and the challenge is, the demand is always growing. So how do we keep up with it? Bruce Onbirbak: They want convenience and that is proven by the sheer numbers we see in our customers usage of Remote Deposit. Penny Crosman: What are some of the features that people were clamoring for? Morne Serfontein: We currently play in the mobile application space, and we recently rolled out the mobile application or mobile apps for our customers and to the small business segment, to some extent. What we are trying to determine is what information is relevant to publish on such a small screen and how do you get to that point that what you re putting on is sufficient for your customers. Quincy Miller: When you define small business, it also really depends on what size of the small business you re talking about. Remote Deposit Capture is important, but things like invoicing are going to be important to add to that functionality on our upper-end app. That s on the commercial platform because you re dealing with much larger customers. It s a completely different user interface, but it does offer more features in terms of how you can manage your business. Michael Cheravitch: As we ve been reaching out to some business owners that are using mobile banking on the consumer side we ve asked, what would you like to see? One thing they ve asked for is a single point of entry for their consumer and business banking apps. So if they log in as a consumer or as a business, they can get to either account anywhere they want to go. One of the things we re hearing from business customers is they would love to see an alert system that says, your account is below whatever level you set it at, and then be able to transfer between their line of credit, their checking or their savings accounts, just like they do on the consumer side. Quite frankly that wasn t one of the functionalities we were going to look at initially. Now we are because we re hearing that they want that ease of being able to move their money when they need to move it. Jim Donnelly: What I d like to see some day is electronic signatures for the documents on ipads. We ll save a lot of paper. We ll get the documents right into the customers account so they have their copies of their originals immediately. Then it s off to processing even before you leave the customers office. It will be a much more efficient system, and I don t think we re that far away from it. That will be when we really take that next step in delivering great customer service, save time, and gain efficiency in the process. Penny Crosman: We are seeing bigger banks or more business-oriented banks trying to weave together the accounting, payroll and cash management tools that the small business is already using so that the small business has one place to do everything. Is that something that you re thinking about? Bruce Onbirbak: We are providing everything at the cash management level: Quicken, RDA and RDC, which is remote deposit capture. They can 2

3 wire, they can ACH, everything at their convenience, their home office or wherever they want to do. All those products are all under one umbrella, and we re probably going to be the first bank who s going to offer those on ipad, because you can t really do cash management on an iphone. Penny Crosman: You mentioned the challenges of having a lot of complicated data on a small screen. What s the level of interest in ipad access for small business? Michael Cheravitch: It s more difficult on the iphone or Android or anything else so the request already from our customers is, when will it be available on the ipad. We don t even have it yet for smart phones and they re already asking for it. Michael Coulter: On the Android tablets, it was quite a quick implementation for us, but the ipad and then the iphone application will take us quite some time to release because of the various controls. In our country, there s a bigger Android focus than there is for an ipad or Apple solution for some reason. There s no real indication on why the country works like that, but just seems to be a choice. Penny Crosman: What about Windows Phone, Surface and Windows 8? Theoretically, you can create one app and it will work on a Windows 8 desktop, tablet and Windows Phone. Is that something you guys are looking at or thinking about? Quincy Miller: The challenge is with keeping up with technology and space, so you have to ask, do you want more functionality or do you want more devices?. That s the challenge because most of us would say yes, we want more functionality, but where does it fall in the queue in terms of demand and the ability to be able to deliver it? Morne Serfontein: With the luxury of consumer diversity, you have a multitude of mobile products you can choose from. It complicates a lot in the banking center because it means for each of these sorts of mobile applications, you need to understand the particular brand or structure. It s quite complicated. The end goal would be where apps are built in such a way that you can very easily roll them out and make required changes across the spectrum of operating systems. Meredith Powers: At AT&T, we have Industry Solutions Teams that assist customers to define, design, deploy and support mobile applications. There is a phenomenon called, the consumerization of IT, which has created a huge demand for B2B as well as B2C mobile applications. If we consider how IT departments must deal with app development and deployment across multiple device types, we can see the value of using an application platform, often known as MEAP in the industry mobile enterprise application platform. Its write-once and deploy-to-many devices. What this means is that mobile applications can be deployed without regard to OS or device type. Remote Deposit Capture is important, but things like invoicing are going to be important to add to that functionality on our upper-end app. Quincy Miller 3

4 There is a phenomenon called, the consumerization of IT, which has created a huge demand for B2B as well as B2C mobile applications. Meredith Powers Penny Crosman: What are some of the challenges to providing mobile apps to small businesses? Kristine Goddard: It s simple: Budgetary. To the best of my knowledge, we need to put this off until 2014 for budget reasons. Jim Donnelly: The list of projects that you have just to stay compliant, make sure that you re keeping up your current systems is long and challenging. We have a great IT department but even they have capacity issues that push well beyond budgetary restraints. Things are changing so quickly that our project list starts off too long and then grows! Selecting the next project to work on is a challenge in this environment. The personalization of the market makes that selection of those projects all the more difficult. Finally, we are trying to give our customers better and quicker access to their information and to our services through multiple devices. The broadening of these services presents other challenges. We wrestle with making the product easy to use and provide robust security. The challenge is to provide the ease of use of these devices without sacrificing that robust security. Michael Cheravitch: We were encountering that same thing. Our IT folks were saying, we don t have the capabilities to do interactive consumer mobile banking. We ve actually hired a technology marketing person to our marketing department. He s working on redesigning our website; he s working on our business mobile apps. He gets it from the sales side, the marketing side and the technology side. It s a rare breed of person that has all three of those, but he s done tremendous work already and he s only been with us for eight months. Morne Serfontein: One strategic decision we took as a group was to create an innovation hub that has its own IT resources. Its core function is to innovate and come up with new stuff, ways to improve the mobile apps, for example. It s a very costly exercise. But there s definitely a need to continue running the bank while building the future bank you want to build. Penny Crosman: Are you concerned about security when you start offering mobile apps to small businesses? Does small business banking introduce higher risk because the dollar amounts are larger and the transactions are more complex? Quincy Miller: Keeping our customers money safe is the first priority for us, so that s one reason why we build things; we build our product internally, which takes us longer versus buying it. It gives us the ability to make sure we have the right controls in place to protect our customers. We ve spent an incredible amount of time ensuring that these processes are safe for our customers. Penny Crosman: Can you share any specific security mechanisms you re using or would like to use? Jim Donnelly: We re very concerned about the security of it all. That s why I mentioned earlier the usability and the security of these devices, software and apps. If you are too heavy on the security side, you may not have any customers using it because it is too chunky to use. We want the products to be easy to use without sacrificing the safety and security of our customer s information. If we can t guarantee that then we shouldn t be offering the product. On our end, being a small bank, we really get to know our customers. We look for anomalies on the way the account is being used. We have the processes and policies to assure that the controls in the system 4

5 The challenge is to provide the ease of use of these devices without sacrificing that robust security. Jim Donnelly are there to protect the customer. Our customers expect no less of us. When you start to get into RDA for instance, you really have a wide-open universe. It s a very attractive product, and customers want it, but there s a whole different risk profile to it. We are taking our time and making sure we understand the risks and what measures we need to take in order to give our customers the comfort they need and deserve. We are spending time and resources to educate our customers on the things they should be doing to protect themselves when using these newer technologies. Bruce Onbirbak: I can give you an example for online wires: you can t just create it yourself and send it through, for security reasons another signer from your company has to go on a different computer and approve it. Or to give you an example for online banking access: recently we opened accounts for 24 different companies with the same signer on all of them, the signer wanted access to all 24 accounts but he didn t want 24 log-in I.D.s, to make it more convenient for him and still protecting each company s assets we gave him access to all of them with one log-in I.D. and the capability of only viewing and printing statements, which means he can t transfer between accounts or pay bills online. One of the things we re hearing from business customers is they would love to see an alert system that says, your account is below whatever level you set it at. Michael Cheravitch 5

6 We re encouraging our customers, on the business side, to start using something like geo-banking payments or send-and-go payments. Michael Coulter Penny Crosman: What about geolocation? Is there a place for that in mobile banking for small businesses? Michael Coulter: In our country there s a strong move to reduce the number of cash interactions simply because it s a very expensive exercise in South Africa to handle cash and remove cash from one side into another side. We re encouraging our customers, on the business side, to start using something like geo-banking payments or send-and-go payments. Penny Crosman: How does the geolocation information help with sending a payment? Morne Serfontein: It helps in that if you understand the entire channel strategy and you know where your brick-andmortar branches and ATMs are located, you could see where you re missing some sweet spot there could be another channel or environment that could add benefit to your retail or business banking customers. So, for example, you could see a lot of transactions happening in one area which could better be facilitated by an ATM. Sometimes just moving an ATM from one corner to another you will see improvement. Penny Crosman: What s the level of interest for you in videoconferencing on the smartphone? Michael Cheravitch: We re going to staff one of our new Chicago branches with two people in the branch. If a customer comes in and wants to apply for credit or a loan, they re going right to video and they re interacting back with somebody in Akron, Ohio. Quincy Miller: We re testing it and finding that not every customer would want to talk to someone over the video. Some customers are very comfortable just going, sitting right down and dealing and having a conversation right over the video screen. We re testing it in a handful of branches on small business, investments and mortgages, and it s been very well received. But again, it s as a choice for the customer versus the solution, and finding the balance is something we are very focused on. 6

7 If you want to increase your customer numbers, it s important to actually go to customers and not wait for them to come and speak to you. Morne Serfontein Penny Crosman: And what about just letting someone use videoconferencing on their ipad or smartphone where they can interact directly with the small business banker? Is that of interest too? Quincy Miller: It s for me, but I m a technology person. What banks have to appreciate is that there are some small businesses that still either aren t that technologically savvy or really don t want to be technologically savvy. This is a real challenge in banking. You have to find a way to serve all of them. If you make everyone only do it one way, it doesn t work well for the customers. Particularly in small businesses we found through other products as we ve tried to innovate them. Penny Crosman: How about internally giving mobile applications to your small business bankers to use? Quincy Miller: Everybody s in a different place. In 2013, we ll have a pilot program eliminating laptop computers for my business bankers and give them ipads for their sales outreach. We ll have some products to do for existing customers right on the ipad, such as treasury solutions and cash management products. The great evolution is being able to actually open accounts for new customers and scan documents from an ipad. Morne Serfontein: Now, it s the hope and it s the strategy that our group has adopted, we want to move away from having branches, and the branches we will have will only be for critical things that cannot happen online or mobile or on an ATM device. If you want to increase your customer numbers, it s important to actually go to customers and not wait for them to come and speak to you. Many financial institutions are in the nascent stages of their mobile-for-smallbusiness strategies, and many of them are finding that opportunities to provide a new level of service through mobile banking exist. Continued discussion will help the industry overcome the challenges and create a better, more relevant banking experience. For more information:

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