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Wireless Banking Gets Real

Harris Bankcorp is latest to go online, while Bank of America and Citigroup aim for summer launch.

By Maria Trombly, Computerworld   

While online brokerages began offering customers wireless access as long as three years ago, banks have been slow to enable customers to use mobile phones and personal digital assistants for bill payments, balance inquiries, and other services. But that's set to change this summer, as banks begin to roll out wireless access to their online services.

Harris Bankcorp is the first out of the gate with this week's rollout of its online services. Harris is a subsidiary of Bank of Montreal, which has been offering wireless banking in Canada through 724 Solutions since March 1999.

Bank of Montreal has launched a major marketing campaign for its service, Veev, which is available in both French and English, according to Ray McManus, spokesperson for 724 Solutions.

Two more 724 Solutions customers, Bank of America and Citigroup, will launch their online services later this summer. Wells Fargo, another 724 customer, will also offer wireless access but hasn't yet announced a starting date.

Clarity Bank and Mexico City-based BBVA Bancomer plan to offer wireless services in the third quarter of this year, also through 724 Solutions. Bancomer's service will be in both Spanish and English.

The trend is accelerating, analysts say.

"Most of the banking vendors out there have announced some wireless arrangement, and so have a lot of the aggregation firms," says Brooke Newcomb, an online banking analyst at Forrester Research.

Banking on Demand

For example, another bank, Wachovia, will begin a pilot project in the next few weeks, according to Lawrence Baxter, its head of electronic business.

"The actual consumer adoption rate of mobile devices is escalating," says Baxter, explaining why the bank decided to jump to wireless now. "And (wireless access) will greatly exceed (access by PCs) in the next couple of years," he says.

It took Wachovia about nine months of analysis, negotiations, and due diligence to get to this point, he says.

"The actual development work will probably take another few weeks, and after that it's just a matter of adding support and scale as usage increases," Baxter says.

Some customers have asked for wireless banking, he says.

"But this is driven not so much by immediate customer demand as by our anticipation of customer demand," Baxter says. "Our whole Internet thrust has always been somewhat ahead of customer demand."

As a result, Wachovia's online banking rate is 20 percent for retail customers, the highest in the industry, according to an April report by Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

Wachovia will initially offer a limited inquiries service for its retail customers and then will expand the service to include bill paying and other transactions, Baxter says. Commercial customers will also have online access to their accounts.

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