Mobile Banking Summit Illustrates Topic is Hot

You don't need to look any further than the attendee list to realize the importance of mobile banking to our industry. Not only is almost every major institution in attendance at this year's Mobile Banking and Emerging Applications Summit, but the number of participants has increased by more than 50% according to officials from SourceMedia.

The program kicked off Sunday with a workshop by David Eads, Founder & CEO of Mobile Strategy Partners LLC where he discussed the basics of getting a Mobile Banking strategy off the ground. He also shared the first of a wave of industry statistics that made it clear to the SRO attendees that this year and next will be pivotal to the mobile banking industry. He also shared keys to developing a business case for introducing mobile banking. He emphasized that while cost reduction (mainly from offloaded balance inquiry calls) could many time justify the investment in mobile banking by itself. a drop in attrition and an increase in revenue from increased interchange and cross-sales will also improve the ROI.


A parade of speakers including Pam Joseph and other players from U. S. Bank, Bob Hedges from Mercatus, several panel discussions, and Jeff Dennes from USAA provided an amazing array of customer research, case studies and predictions for the future of this channel. During the U.S. Bank presentation, there was discussion of a new Mobile Shopping Concierge application where coupons, offers and even store layouts may be provided and the discussion of upcoming introductions of both a Remote Deposit Capture application as well as a P2P application (probably the most discussed new application of the day from many organizations including Bank of the West).

The best line of the day came from Bob Hedges, who began his presentation of a ton of industry research by saying, "Making a business case for mobile banking is like making a business case for oxygen"! One of the more unusual moments came from 10-11 AM PT, when it was obvious many in attendance were using their phones (and a surprising number of iPads) to get immediate updates on today's speech by Steve Jobs. Another helpful use of phones came throughout the day when pictures were taken of the slides in the presentations  by many since SourceMedia does not include the presentations in the conference materials, and then only partially share presentations 2-3 weeks after the event.

I will be digging much deeper into my notes over the next couple days to share insights from this great conference that ends tomorrow. In addition to key research, I will be sharing marketing ideas that were discussed as well as significant trends that we will probably see in 2010 and 2011.

By the way, for those unable to attend, the location of the conference was at the M Resort which was beautiful, but seemed like it was in LA due to the distance from the strip and the temperatures today approached 110 degrees. So yes, the conference was HOT!