With Credit Suisse’s Report about the ever-increasing sales of Smartphones till 2017, it is safe to assume that enterprise mobility is here to stay. According to Credit Suisse’s IT Hardware Analyst Mr.Garcha, “The cost of Smart Phones is going to halve in the next five years”. It is expected that the cost of the low-end Smart Phones would be under $46 from the current $70 in India and under $103 a pop in the US. The rise of enterprise mobility is imminent with such projections. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has named SAP and IBM as leaders in Enterprise Mobility. They have learnt that slowness in adopting newer technologies in the hope of piggy-backing on existing products will only lead to the emergence of new players who can erase their existence. A famous example would be – Xerox!
So what is New Banking? And why has it become a buzzword? We all know what financial inclusion is and what it aims to achieve. Enterprise Mobility is a catalyst helping us to achieve that aim sooner. According to IIBF “Financial inclusion is delivery of banking services at an affordable cost to the vast sections of disadvantaged and low income group. Unrestrained access to public goods and services is the sine qua non of an open and efficient society. As banking services are in the nature of public good, it is essential that availability of banking and payment services to the entire population without discrimination is the prime objective of the public policy.”
The synergy of Enterprise Mobility coupled with Financial Inclusion can boost the economy to a great extent. Mobility offers new means to reach out to potential customers. Mobile Banking is convenient compared to the cumbersome activity of going to the bank to carry out your chores. To explain what enterprise mobility can do, we look at SAP for mobile’s partnership with Standard Bank, South Africa. In a research, it was revealed that more than 80% of people in sub-Sahara Africa don’t have access to traditional financial services. The main reason was the lack of proof of residences as they could not afford a residence, but what they could afford was Smartphones!
Working with the SAP Mobile Platform and integrating with SAP core banking, Standard Bank developed a mobile app for their agents that they can use to open new accounts from any location at any time. The agents were sent out to the field to identify such individuals, and once identified a new account was opened for them with their Official ID. The bank has removed the dependence of paperwork like proof of residence. This can be compared to the famous movie “Munnabhai MBBS” wherein the movie addressed the impracticality that a critical patient seeking medical assistance needs to fill out paperwork before the medical aid is administered. Enterprise Mobility is already proving to be the answer to a “Greener planet” by eliminating mundane, redundant paperwork. Standard Bank has also cut the time taken to open an account in half with the help of the power app called “Access-Banking”.
Standard Bank is not the only one to foray into mobility, Dutch-Bangla Bank is also providing mobile banking in a much similar way, but the issue addressed here is security of cash transfers. Mobility can automate many banking operations which would otherwise take a long time.
Mobile Banking has evolved tremendously over the past few years. Voice enabled enterprise-apps are poised to replace typing. Apple’s personal voice assistant Siri is just a trailer, the Block-busters of the new speech-enabled apps are yet to come and they are here to stay. Banktech.com predicts a number of mobile banking headlines around overall integration and the usage of unique mobile capabilities to provide differentiated service offerings. The first trend is integration, across delivery channels and across functionalities or lines of business. Integration across delivery channels will provide consumers with seamless access to services across desktop, mobile, car and television. A consumer will be able to kick off a banking enrollment or “account opening journey” on a mobile phone and complete it on a desktop. He/she will be able to access their mobile applications through the car voice system or screen.
Other trend that will pick up in 2013 is exploiting the unique capabilities to come up with differentiated services. The capabilities leveraged would be Geo-location, Voice , Image capture etc. The build-up to mobility for banking is dazzling; we are waiting with bated breath to experience what is in store!
{ This post is written by Ashwini Iyer. Ashwini is a information technology and services enthusiast, currently pursuing her Masters of Business Administration}
The post Guest Post: Banking the Unbanked with Enterprise Mobility appeared first on Mobility in Enterprise.