This week in the Industry focus series I’d like
to focus on Mobile Banking or
mBanking. To begin with I’d like to present some statistics:
a. Mobile Banking users to exceed 1 Billion
in 2017 about 15% of Global Mobile
Population.1
b. 48% of Mobile Phone users have use Mobile
Banking in past 12 months.2
c. Most common use of mBanking is to check
account balances, transactions and payments.2
d. Transferring money is 2nd most
common use case.. 2
e. 21% of Mobile banking users have
deposited a check using their mobile phone.2
f.
Users of Kenya's M-Pesa
system send 20% of the country's GDP to each other via text message each year.5
g.
48% of mobile phone
owners do not use mobile banking services because of security concerns. 5
and more … you get the picture
Mobile
banking brings about the notion of anywhere and anytime banking, but as banks
and financial institutions evaluate
Mobile banking options, the costs and security risks outweigh the clear
advantages of improving customer experience. So as Mobile Solution Architects we ought to understand the
Industry landscape, regulatory environment, the business and technical
landscape that govern the Mobile Banking imperatives. This post is an attempt
to introduce the Mobile banking Industry focus. Let us break this down into
Business and technical landscape to make the discussion more consumable:
Business Imperatives:
a. Regulatory
Considerations - Financial sector regulation, telecom
sector regulations, bank policy coordination, MFS ( Mobile Financial Services)
regulations.
b. Consumer
Protection – Regulation,
enforcement and protection, which drives the similar limits of liability on
mBanking transactions.
c. Competitive
Advantage – Enhance
customer interaction, client service and new engagement models
d. Market
Catalyst - new B2C, B2B services, and drivers (
cost and competitive) that are drivers behind Mobile Banking in all sectors
such as Consumer banking, financial services and Wealth Management.
e.
Adoption and availability -
These refer to market catalyst
and drivers that lead to adoption of Mobil centric services and drive a Banking enterprise to make
these sought after services available for general consumption be it, B2B, or
even B2B.
Technical Imperatives :
a. Understanding
the security Implications
– this includes data on device,
data in transit, data in enterprise, but also includes considerations around
malware, malicious application ( on same device), wireless carrier
infrastructure, availability to tools and fraud control policies. Etc.
b. Payment
technology Landscape
- Banks do have to consider the
payment technology landscape. Today, primary elements of mobile payment
technology include (but not limited to) NFC (Near field communication), SE
(secure element – cryptographic module), TSM (trusted service manager – handles
transactions – sort of like a transacting clearing house) and Cloud based
payment services ( Google digital wallets and Passbook based)
c. Risk
Mitigation – Measures
that can be taken to address security challenges of Mobile Banking and payments. These include Fraud
detection and alert, secure notification system, Mobile application design and
policy that govern end user action. Understanding, access and fraud detection
and alert system in the application design process.
d. OmniChannel
Service integration - Enable
bi-directional access, and communication across all channels of communication
including request for contact center callbacks from all channels.
e. Secure
notification Landscape -
email/SMS/online msg/app alerts, generate
automatic fraud alert, offers, promotions etc that is sent to customers in real-time. The alert use deep linking to enable
things like, direct dial to fraud agent, schedule a callback or even click
through to disable the block from the mobile app. Application Design
considerations.
f. Mobile
Device and Application Landscape
– This deals with the policies and technology to provide malware and jail break
detection, Spyware and SMS Trojans, Mobile OS and Application runtime
vulnerabilities and so on. All this is geared towards preventing privileged
access to application and user data that can compromise the integrity of a
transaction.
And more…
As Mobile Professionals we should understand these
industry specifics and approach a solution. From a product perspective we should be able to map the products in
the product Portfolio to address these business and technical imperatives,
for instance:
a. Secure
Mobile Application Platform
- IBM WL ( MEAP – Application
development and management platform) + ISAM ( Risk based access and access
management) + IBM AppScan (security vulnerability – application development) + ARXAN ( this is NOT an IBM products
but provides an important functionality for securing an app during runtime on
the device). (++and may Be our own Data Power family of appliances for middleware and edge security and integration)
b. Secure
and Scalable Mobile Notification Platform –Think - IBM
MessageSight ( Secure Internet scale messaging with QoS features and
integration with IBM WL) + IBM WL ( Integration with Public and MQTT/Message
sight based notification system and IN app Notification center) + IBM MB ( good
old robust Message Broker).
c. Secure
Event and client experience management
– Think QRadar ( security information and event correlation and management) +
IBM TeaLeaf ( client experience management) To ensure security event monitoring and client experience.
And more…
Next Post – I will discuss Enterprise Mobile Maturity Model – a vital tool to ease the
mobile discussion, add structure and make it more consumable!!
As always I look
forward to your suggestions, thoughts and critique… have a great week ahead!
:)
Nitin
Sources:
