CIT Bank Launches Mobile App — and No One Notices

CIT Group launched its first mobile banking app last quarter. Yeah, no one else noticed either.

CIT Bank, the financial conglomerate’s $16.1 billion online bank, was launched in 2011 to diversify its parent’s funding. Indeed, CIT nearly went bankrupt during the credit crisis when the capital markets all but silenced, cutting off its primary source of funds.

CIT Bank hasn’t exactly been a high-profile retail extravaganza for its parent, however. Yes, the bank is growing its total assets 32% last year. (It looks like it is just pounding Bankrate ads.) But the bank — a Jack Henry & Co. technology client — has been anything but revolutionary in its product set.

Last quarter, to zero fanfare, the bank launched its mobile app, more than three years after the direct bank’s launch. This is a barebones offering, to boot. One customer commented on iTunes: “I have been waiting for this in a long time. The apps features are so basic. I cannot even see the scheduled transfer. [There is] no ‘remember my login name.’ Well,better than nothing. Need to update now!!”

How far below the radar was this app launch? Last week, Scott T. Parker, CIT’s chief financial officer, chief accounting officer and executive vice president (lots of titles), sheepishly said on the company’s earnings call last week: “[I]n the fourth quarter, I don’t know if you saw, but we did roll out our mobile banking for CIT Bank.” Uh, no one saw it, Scott.

This lackluster approach to mobile banking flies in the face of some new data from Cisco today (ht Sam Maule):

• Mobile data is expected to grow by 11 times in the next four years, reaching 18 exabytes per month by 2018. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.
• Mobile data traffic is expected to grow by 61% annually into 2018, with the extra traffic from just one year — 2017 — expected to be triple the entire mobile internet in 2013.
• There will be more mobile users, nearly 5 billion by 2018 (up from 4.1 billion in 2013) and more than 10 billion mobile-ready devices, including machine-to-machine connections by then (up from 7 billion in 2013).

For a direct bank, CIT Bank’s technology initiatives seem to move at the pace of a brick-and-mortar behemoth. And that just might be the point. Parker last week said that the bank was considering adding brick-and-mortar branches. Fitting.

Learn more about what’s next in banking at Bank Innovation 2014 on March 3-4 in Seattle. Request an invitation here.