During the past few weeks many mobile banking vendors aligned themselves with big brands. To mention a few: Obopay with Nokia, Monitise and Visa and the purchase of Macalla by Roamware. All of these alignments happened on the basis of an equity arrangement. Also in the past two weeks, Sybase/paybox announced deployment relationship with IBM and mCom a distribution agreement with Microsoft.This flurry of activities could be on the basis of two possible reasons. Either this market is getting so attractive that the big elephants all want a piece of the action or it is getting so dangerous that the small elephants need protection. In aligning themselves with a big elephant these vendors receive numerous benefits, ranging from brand awareness to access to markets. But these transactions also come with a big downside: the relinquishing of strategic control and direction and the ability to dictate their own destiny. In the end it will be results and customer satisfaction that will dictate the ultimate leaders and not the label used to sell the solution.