Yodlee Aims at Big Adoption for M-Banking, M-Payment Service

Yodlee Inc., which on Tuesday introduced a mobile version of its online-banking applications, expects the new product to attract between 5 million and 6 million users within the next three years, according to Aashir Shroff, senior product manager for Yodlee Mobile. The service, which allows banks to offer customers the ability to perform, from almost any cell phone, an array of functions from reviewing statements to paying bills and transferring funds, comes as consumers appear to be increasingly willing to access Web sites and do financial transactions from handsets. “The timing is impeccable,” says Shroff. “A lot of financial institutions see their customers using their Blackberries to check e-mails and sports scores.” Yodlee Mobile, which will become available commercially in the first quarter, works by connecting customers to scaled-down versions of their banks' Web sites and works on any phone that supports the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) or mobile HTML standards. Users log on with their online-banking passwords or with a single sign-on that can use two-factor authentication. Messages are scrambled with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and flow through mobile carriers to Yodlee's platform to financial institutions. The company says it has signed a deal with Vodafone Group PLC, a U.K. carrier, to support the service and is working on similar agreements with U.S. and European mobile operators. One key advantage of Yodlee Mobile for banks may be its apparently quick time to market. The service doesn't require users to download software to their phones, and integration work at banks is minimal, Shroff says. Banks can get a pilot under way within a couple of days to a week, he says, depending on the bank's size, and can deploy it commercially within one to three weeks. Banks that have adopted Yodlee's MoneyCenter platform, which allows customers to make payments, transfer funds, and manage their finances, will be able to offer the platform also through Yodlee Mobile. Shroff says pricing for the mobile service is still being worked out. MoneyCenter clients, however, will be able to bolt it on at no extra cost. Shroff refuses to say how many banks have signed up so far for MoneyCenter, which Yodlee launched earlier this year (Digital Transactions News, June 27). Among its features, MoneyCenter allows same-day bill payments and payment by credit card. Yodlee Mobile represents a second effort to break into the mobile arena for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, whose software lets banks offer online-banking and payment services that pull in customers' financial information from thousands of external data bases. In 2000 and 2001, it tried to get banks to adopt a product called Yodlee to Go, but slow carrier networks and smaller bandwidths hampered the product. “It was too early,” says Shroff. Now, he says, network technology has caught up with the needs of handset users, paving the way for a renewed thrust into the mobile market. “Big banks seeing that mobile needs to be on their agenda.,” he says, citing research showing that one-quarter of all mobile-device users will be browsing the Web from their handsets by 2010.