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Growing demand from financial institutions for more advanced mobile- banking features is prompting Brookfield, Wis.-based banking-solutions provider Fiserv Inc. to expand the breadth of services available through its Mobiliti mobile-banking platform. A key service will be person-to-person payments, a Fiserv executive says.
Fiserv plans to make its Popmoney person-to-person payments service a standard feature of Mobiliti by the end of the year. P2P payments are currently an option available only to large and mid-size Mobiliti users. Once Popmoney becomes a standard feature, it will be available to financial institutions of any size. Fiserv, which last year bought P2P provider CashEdge Inc., enables such payments through about 1,400 banks.
“Making P2P an integrated feature of Mobiliti allows consumers to make a payment directly from the mobile app versus having to download a separate Popmoney app or need to visit a different site in the browser to make that payment,” says Steve Shaw, vice president of strategic marketing, Digital Channels and Electronic Payments, for Fiserv. “It also provides a better user experience for the consumer and a better branding and customer-satisfaction opportunity for the financial institution.”
Although rumors of talks between Fiserv and clearXchange, the P2P platform provider owned by Bank of America Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co., about linking the two networks have surfaced in the last week, Fiserv declined comment on the matter.
Payments experts contend that linking Popmoney and clearXchange would provide a powerful incentive for consumers to adopt P2P applications, as they could move P2P payments through a large percentage of banks.
“Any way for the banks to make the transmittal of money between individuals easier is a huge benefit to them and puts them in position to pull some of that business away from Western Union,” says Todd Ablowitz, president of Double Diamond Group LLC, a Denver-based consulting firm. “The big questions for Fiserv are what will it cost banks to offer their P2P application and how will consumers respond if that cost is passed on to them.”
Since acquiring Atlanta-based mobile-banking technology provider Mobile Commerce Ltd. (M-com) 18 months ago, Fiserv has been continually upgrading Mobiliti. Enhancements include applications specifically for Android and Blackberry smart phones and the iPhone. An application for tablet computers is expected later this year.
“M-com is now Mobiliti,” says “Once we acquired M-com, the plan was to try and move all our clients on to Mobiliti and enhance the platform.” Currently, the majority of the 1,100 financial institutions using Fiserv’s mobile-banking applications have deployed Mobiliti, according to Shaw..
In addition to P2P payments, Mobiliti enables consumers to check account balances, locate ATMs, receive alerts, pay bills, and transfer funds between accounts.
Fiserv is also breaking out its mobile source capture solution within Mobiliti as a stand-alone application. Mobile source capture allows consumers to deposit checks by snapping photos of the front and back of the check with their smart phone and transmitting the images for processing through their mobile application.
“We get a lot of requests for this application on a stand-alone basis and now that we’ve detached it from Mobiliti it opens the door to a lot broader adoption,” says Shaw.
