VeriSign, Clairmail offer mobile banking as managed solution

Mobile banking service provider Clairmail Inc. is partnering with digital infrastructure provider VeriSign Inc. to offer financial institutions multiple options for mobile banking as a managed service.
The two companies made the announcement today, but said they have been working together for months and have already received a high level of interest from banks of various sizes. While some banks have pursued carrier-specific partnerships to provide mobile banking and have explored in-house development for the service, representatives from Clairmail and VeriSign said they weren’t expecting the very high level of interest from large banks that want to approach mobile banking as a managed service.
“We’ve been surprised that this managed service offering was so attractive to a number of top-10 banks,” said David Thompson, vice president of marketing for Clairmail. “We expected it to be popular with the tier-two and tier-three banks, and it has been-but we’ve got a positive response and a number of customers across the board.”
Thompson and Brian Matthews, VP of enterprise solutions for VeriSign, said that among tier-one banks, they see a level of interest of about 40% to 50% in mobile banking as a managed service, with even higher percentages among smaller banks.
Clairmail’s platform allows VeriSign to offer mobile banking services via messaging, the mobile Web or a native client. VeriSign had its own mobile banking offering, which focused on alerts and notifications, Matthews noted, but the company chose to partner with Clairmail in order to enable two-way interactions, which is one of the company’s major differentiators.
Mobile banking as a managed service appeals to banks because of
quicker time-to-market, lower cost and flexibility, according to Thompson.
Matthews and Thompson said they expect to begin seeing rollouts of more banking services as trials and then commercial launches during the fourth quarter and first quarter of 2008, with significantly more deployment next year. M-commerce and payments may be introduced by some banks upfront, Thompson said, but most seem to put such services more in the 2009 or later timeframe as interest and adoption evolves.
While carriers will benefit indirectly from increased data use by consumers and relationships with the carriers are important to successfully launching native mobile banking applications, Matthews said that many banks are seeking a mobile banking service that will work regardless of a customer’s carrier affiliation.
“The last thing they want to do is dictate to existing customers, or new customers looking at their services, that the only way they can receive that is by switching carriers,” Matthews said. “They’re looking for much more of an open solution.”