Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: And most of it goes into the garbage.

Diarmuid Mallon: At best. Maybe they just get something from the headquarters of the store. They have no insight. Those vouchers sell products but gain no customer insight. So, we’ve been working with some consumer product companies and have found interesting ways to use mobile as a way of providing that customer insight. Closely linked to that is the whole point of loyalty as well.

SM: Those are more the marketing applications of using and making marketing applications available at the mobile terminal points. When it comes to mobile payments and mobile banking, my assessment is that adoption is going to come from the emerging markets. India alone is going to be a big adoption use case in the next few years as the unique identification number (UID) system ramps up. I think India’s going to go en masse into mobile banking.

DM: They will switch quickly, but still, I believe that there’s a real opportunity in developed markets. It’s about creating new value and services around the payments.

SM: To me, what’s exciting is that conceivably, within the next decade – let’s say by 2020 – another billion or even two billion people can have a full mobile banking access. You know India, countries in Africa and Latin America, all these countries will finally come on board in terms of mobile banking. There’s going to be a massive adoption of mobile banking.

DM: There is. You are seeing this leap frogging in terms of technology. They’ve bypassed the PC and gone straight to mobile. What’s interesting is that you’re starting to see that as well in developed markets. In the U.S., there are about 25% of people whose primary Internet channels are their mobile phones. In the U.K., it’s about 22%. So, there’s already a shift towards mobile. Clearly, [almost] everyone’s got a mobile phone, and the rise of the tablets as devices, but this post-PC environment is there. But what’s interesting is that in many places like India and China and such are going to get there first. They’re also going to get to the post-plastic environment in terms of credit cards. Their first credit cards will be virtual ones on their phones. It’s massively exciting.

SM: I think we discussed something major. Thank you, Diarmuid, for talking with me.

DM: Thank you, Sramana.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking
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