ING Vysya Bank, IBM Partner for Better Mobile Banking

Launched back in July, this new banking app is supposed to enhance banks’ reach into very remote areas and new markets, according to the press from the company. All about availability and customization, the ING Vysya Mobile app will allow customers easily pay utility bills, transfer funds to other accounts, view mini-statements, make bank requests, and a range of other common functions via their smart devices.

As for IBM Worklight, and the IBM MobileFirst solutions portfolio overall, these app developmental tools are a critical part of what is rapidly becoming a gold rush, need driven mobile development ecosystem. Supporting this trend, there’s a library of research into mobile banking and other financial “connectivity” data out there. A recent Pew Research study showed 35% of cell phone owners, bank using their mobile phones already. What’s  more, for some mobile banking tasks a vast majority of mobile users routinely interact with their banks. A study  by the Federal Reserve in March of this year revealed almost 90 percent of mobile users access their banking balances via their devices. The list of evidenciary proof mobile banking is a void needing filling developmentally, is nearly endless today.

Finally, given that customer experience, and the shift to devices that users take mobile have arrived, we’ll see more and more app development tools like IBM Worklight enter the picture. For IBM though, it also seems clear a “head start” offers that company great advantage. The Chief Information Officer for ING Vysya Bank,  Aniruddha Paul, puts puts the IBM news in perspective via this press release quote:

“With an IBM mobile solution, we are now able to quickly and easily roll out new mobile services to support our business growth strategies.”

On the “con” side of the mobile banking situation slow page loads have killed many a mobile banking app conversion metric. With security and other issues almost erradicated these days, pure convenience and experience is now the Holy Grail of app adaptation. A firm that measures such things, Maxymiser, showed in their research that 68% of those surveyed will not wait longer than 6 seconds for a page to load to complete “any” transaction. One company here in Europe, Fast White Cat, selected IBM Worklight in large part to solve just this sort of “optimization” problem. Besides IBM’s reputation for helping get apps to market fast, the whole page rendering situation grows more and more vital.