Having now worked with many banks in many countries during my ten years in the industry, I believe that I now have enough raw data to postulate five phases of Bank Adoption of mobile banking. This is still theory and it would be good to test it with other experiences and this is why I am publishing it in an untested format.The five stages of bank adoption of mobile banking is as follows:
- Phase One: Denial. During this phase the bank vehemently deny that they would ever need mobile banking. They explain why customers do not want to do transactions from silly things like mobile phones.
- Phase Two: Experimentation. A few young people in the IT department convince some managers to experiment with unimportant things like alerts. Take-up is slow especially because no marketing budget is spent on this. This fuels the opinions of skeptics.
- Phase Three: Collaboration. Marketing executives seeing that this is not going to go away start collaborating with (especially) mobile operators. Many different models for this exist, but all produce a solution partly mobile operator, partly bank. The marriage is uneasy but executives try to make it work and limited success is seen.
- Phase Four: Mainstream. The realisation suddenly dawns that it would be impossible to do banking without mobile banking. The bank starts investing heavily leveraging existing infrastructure. Existing Internet banking or ATM solutions are ported to many different types of handsets. Marketing budgets are spent on this new thing and uptake is good. The business case is however under pressure and doubts are raised regarding security
- Phase Five: Maturity. After lots of experiences banks realise that this is not a channel play, this is not an extension of classic banking, but a totally new thing. The CEO realises that many existing truths must be changed in order to grasp the full context of what mobile will do to banking. I think that this is the end state