What's in your [mobile] wallet?

Both AT&T and Verizon run Firethorn-powered mobile banking offerings. AT&T has been offering its service — focused on balance inquiry, transaction history, bill presentment, payment and transfer functionality — since November of last year. Through Firethorn, the carrier partners with several banks to offer a downloadable Java-based client for its handsets. AT&T plans to pre-load the application into at least 34 handsets by the end of the year.

“The client model we chose was because we thought it was superior to a [wireless application protocol]-based mobile Internet session or messaging session in that it allows for offline operation,” said Spencer White, director of mobile financial services for AT&T. “The information you refresh to your screen gets stored on the handset, so if you're on a train traveling, you can still open up the application and see the most recent info you loaded into the phone and queue up transactions. Next time you are in coverage, it will go ahead and process that automatically for you — a fire-and-forget type of functionality.”

Right now the service essentially replicates the online experience, but White said that as AT&T moves from mobile banking to mobile payments, the carrier also is looking at doing more advanced banking functions and applications. While AT&T has yet to deploy NFC, it has done two large consumer trials with the technology. White said that the consumer market does not yet have a sense of what the technology can mean. Most NFC experiments have been in Asia to date. That said, NFC should prove to be a “see it to believe it” type of service.

“What we found, though, is that after introducing that technology and letting [consumers] touch it, feel it, play with it and use it, they get very excited about it,” White said. “If the gating factor to launching mobile payments was consumer enthusiasm, we probably would've launched a long time ago because we've seen the basic technology works really well. It's based on RFID technology, it's been around for a while, and consumers have given us rave reviews at every point. It really has been trying to figure out how to align the interests of both the telecom industry and the financial services industry so that we can bring these services to market in a way that makes sense to consumers.”

Mobile Money Ventures, a joint venture between Citi and SK Telecom, was formed in March to address this same issue in the market for mobile financial services across the globe. Its first customer implementation is with Citibank Hong Kong, announced at the end of July. Going forward, Steve Kietz, CEO of MMV and executive vice president for Citi, envisions consumers picking up the service and their mobile phones as a complete alternative to the online experience.

“We think we need the core functionality wherever we operate in terms of basic banking and brokerage, and then we have a product road map with many services that are ahead of the curve,” Kietz said. “A lot of them are based on what we've seen in South Korea, where they also have some of the sharing and receipt capture.”