Mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile commerce are moving up the agenda in the boardrooms of banks all around the world, but traditional lenders – which have a branch network and legacy infrastructure to maintain – are split between those that dare to take the lead and those that trail behind. The innovators risk sinking funds into projects that will not pay off; the laggards risk becoming irrelevant and losing customers to next-generation digital players.
“Bankers feel pressured by mobile and think ‘we must do something’ because they keep picking up these reports saying that mobile is going to be huge and is going to be the way people will pay. But when they look at it they cannot see how to make money out of it – that is the dilemma,” says John Chaplin, a director at Anthemis Edge, the advisory arm of financial services firm Anthemis Group.
