NEW YORK-Citigroup and Sonera Ltd. announced last week they are taking an undisclosed ownership stake in 724 Solutions, a Canadian software company that is hardly a household name but could hold the key to global mobile banking.
Juha Snellman, director of sales and marketing for Sonera SmartTrust, Helsinki, Finland, said Toronto-based 724 Solutions offers financial transaction access to any user on any device.
SmartTrust is a business unit of the Finnish telecommunications services provider. Snellman said it develops and sells technology based on open Public Key Infrastructure standards that provides four components needed for monetary transactions over the airwaves: confidentiality; integrity so that data cannot be altered after it is transmitted; authentication so that both the consumer and the financial institution can verify each other’s identities; and non-repudiation so that neither party to a transaction can renege after the fact.
Sonera, which has focused on the Global System for Mobile communications sector, sees 724 Solutions as its gateway to worldwide acceptance of SmartTrust’s technology by companies in countries with other wireless standards.
“724 Solutions offers a platform to build channels between financial services and mobile services. It supports different kinds of devices, and it isn’t limited to the banking industry,” Snellman said.
“Our partnership with 724 gives us a clear step forward to go to the global marketplace for any user with any device on any (wireless) network.”
GSM customers will get early access to this service, said Snellman and Kevin Parks, vice president of wireless access devices for e-Citi, the electronic banking arm of Citigroup, New York.
Snellman said he expects Leonia Bank in Finland and EQ Online, a Finnish Internet brokerage firm, to roll out the service within a few months.
Parks said Citigroup, which has 100 million customers worldwide, plans to debut the service in the Asia-Pacific region by early next year. Customers with Web-browsing phones likely will be given the equivalent of an Internet address to contact electronically. Those with palmtop computers likely would download access software into their devices from Citigroup’s Web site, he added.
The multiplicity of wireless standards in the United States means that Citigroup customers in this country likely will be waiting awhile to access their accounts over their wireless devices, Parks said.
However, that consideration has not stopped the California-based Bank of America, which has 37 million retail customers, from jumping on board 724 Solution’s bandwagon ahead of the others. Additionally, The Bank of Montreal is engaged in trials of the service over Bell Mobility’s Code Division Multiple Access digital data network, said Alistair Renny, senior vice president of marketing for 724 Solutions.
“724 Solutions has nailed down a protocol-independent system to provide financial institutions with an end-to-end infrastructure because banks don’t want to deal with all the (wireless) technologies,” he said.
The privately held firm, established just two years ago, also has alliances with Phone.com, 3Com/Palm Computing, Qualcomm Inc., Certicom and Neopoint.
