Shuffling the Mobile Banking Vendor Deck: A Comparison of Mobile Retail Banking Solutions
Abstract
Since 2007, the mobile banking market has changed significantly in terms of predominant technologies, features/functionality, and consumer adoption. Correspondingly, there has been a considerable shift in Celent’s evaluation of vendors in this market, as some have kept up with market developments (or even led them), whereas others have fallen behind.
In this report, Shuffling the Mobile Banking Vendor Deck: A Comparison of Mobile Retail Banking Solutions, Celent details how vendors’ rankings have changed, given that many have matured in the last three years and begun to gain their stride. Whereas many vendors originally focused on one modality (SMS/text vs. mobile web vs. app), they now offer all three. The report’s ABCD Vendor View presents a comparative view that visually represents at a glance the relative positions of each vendor in four dimensions: Advanced technology, Breadth of functionality, Customer base, and Depth of client services. XCelent Awards have been given to the top-performing vendors in each of the four categories.
As part of the evaluation process, Celent looked for the live availability of over 100 feature functionalities. Most vendors had a basic set of these functionalities live in-market. Vendors that were barely present in the mobile banking space three years ago now have the largest number of live FI clients.
"While vendor focus was once more on user interfaces, emphasis has shifted to back-end analytics," says Red Gillen, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Banking Group and author of the report. "With only a handful of financial institution implementations under their belts three years ago, many vendors now have experience with hundreds of FIs."