U.S. Bank Stepping Up Its Mobile Game, Chief Strategy Officer Says
Forget March Madness. U.S. Bank just scored a few more points in the mobile banking game.
Indeed, the fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States knocked out its remote deposit capture mobile functionality to its customers this week, making it one of the first major banks in the nation to offer RDC to its customers. For now, RDC for mobile is exclusive to U.S. Bank’s iPhone customers.
But, in an exclusive interview with Bank Innovation, U.S. Bancorp.’s executive vice president and chief strategy officer, said that the Minneapolis bank plans to inject the Android with RDC capabilities by this summer. Howell D. “Mac” McCullough III explained that U.S. Bank’s mobile strategy is based on the fact that mobile devices are central to consumers’ lives.
“If you forget a mobile device when you walk out of the door, you realize very quickly, ‘I don’t have my phone with me,’” McCullough tells Bank Innovation. “With the credit card, you could go days and not realize you left your credit card in a different suit or maybe even at a restaurant.”
In tandem with the RDC announcement, U.S. Bank also debuted new real-time text or email alerts for credit card customers. Like RDC, real-time alerts are equally important to mobile devices given the immediacy of the devices to consumers.
That immediacy is one of the reasons why U.S. Bank – along with the entire banking industry – has its eye on movement within the mobile payments scene, McCullough says. U.S. Bank, for one, entered the mobile payment testing playground by piloting a service through Visa, DeviceFidelity, FIS and Monitise last November. In a number of states, its customers can pay by waving their phones in front of Visa payWave contactless payment technology.
TRIAL UPDATE
At this point, McCullough says the cell-phones-as-payment trial has its “ups and downs” like any pilot, but he has noticed that retailers are becoming more accepting of the technology overall, which is crucial to its success.
“In general, we are seeing good acceptance and are seeing more retailers provide contactless devices,” says McCullough. “That is really the key to get adoption across the marketplace. The more retailers, the more we will see the capability. Visa and Mastercard started the same way. They needed acceptance so consumers would ask for it.”
Still, McCullough believes ubiquity of mobile payments is still a few years off.
On U.S. Bank’s nearer-term radar is integrating its online and mobile channels tighter as it sees “a pretty large overlap” between the channels,” he says. “We will get to a point that what’s available online will be made available through the mobile device.”
Perhaps that has something to do with the tablet, which has also secured a spot on U.S. Bank’s and McCullough’s road map.
“We are doing some work with the tablets,” McCullough says. “What’s pretty cool with tablets is that it does give you more real estate and a bit more processing power. …You can start to present information to customers and maybe communicate in a different way.”
The key to any of these mobile efforts, though, is making sure the right customers are hearing the right messages, McCullough stresses. He says the mobile banking innovations are not just Gen Y-centric, but are applicable across the various customer demographics. Marketing messages should reflect that, he says.
“Clearly things are moving very quickly,” he says.
