Banking is going mobile!
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Tue, Jul 06, 2010
There is this huge debate in India about who should own and drive the Mobile banking journey! Should it be the telecom operators or the banks! Recently, Duvvuri Subbarao, governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), said at the Banking Technology Excellence Awards, “World over, there are two distinct models in mobile banking - the bank led model and the mobile operator led model. The Reserve Bank has a clear preference for the bank led model.”
Indian mobile banking has two major segments: the urban segment and the rural segment. Celent, a consulting company, estimates that urban mobile banking subscribers will reach 65 million by 2012. The rural mobile segment represents a huge opportunity to bank the unbanked population, thereby adding a revenue stream. But I wonder how much are banks dipping into their vast treasure trove of transactional data to actually analyze the behavior changes that are driving adoption! Are consumers following a path through more advanced usage of ATM's and on to Internet banking and then they become Mobile banking users? Or are Mobile banking users distinct consumers with different needs?
Whoever leads this journey, banks or telecom companies,the important thing is who is more likely to drive customer adoption and be more “customer centric” in their focus? Both industries, Telecom & Banking have a huge “new customer acquisition focus” and both have over the last 5 years been penetrating the market and bringing in a huge set of customers who are now beginning to expect far better customers service and more products configured to their needs. In my view the critical area to think about is how are banks profiling and developing a better understanding of their customers who are “early adopters” of tech led services such as Net banking, Mobile banking, Direct pay etc.
Banks have so much information about what is leading to this kind of channel migration. How much of this information is being looked at analytically to deliver a better “one view” of this “new age” customer?