When mobile banking is in the news, it’s usually about the consumer side, but that view misses a wide swath of innovation in financial services today. Bells and whistles such as mobile check deposit are making their way over to the corporate side, and with considerably advanced features.
The numbers in play on the corporate side can make consumer numbers look paltry in comparison. Citigroup, for example, processed over $440 billion in mobile payments from corporate customers in 2014.
Mayank Mishra, managing director and global head online banking and connectivity services, presenting at Bank Innovation 2015 in Seattle last week, noted that the sharp increase in global mobile device penetration had driven 80% of companies to institute Bring Your Own Device policies.
Mobile is inevitable, so enterprises need to deal with it. About 80% of enterprise user access to company sites and services will be via mobile devices by 2020, compared with just 5% of such use today.
Corporations are making their services available to employees via mobile devices, and developing the protocols to ensure the secure use of such devices in the enterprise space. This is true for institutions such as Citibank serving those corporations as well. Citibank follows procedures such as splitting the creation and authorization of a payment between two parties, because, well, people lose their phones, even treasury managers.
Mobile is transformative, as is the related use of social collaboration. Collaboration over social networks and private cloud services are coming into play to increase the efficiency of multi-party processes such as corporate payments.
Globalization is rapidly accelerating the need for social tools and platforms and more secure cloud-based systems for use by corporates, Mishra said.
Mishra also said that 6.8 billion mobile devices are now in use around the world, more than one per person, but that does not mean, of course, that everyone in the world has a mobile device, let alone a smart or internet-enabled device. Smartphones in use as a percentage of the global population has now reached 22% and is rising steeply, though not as steeply as tablets, at 6%. PCs have leveled off around 20%.
Alongside increased speed and efficiency runs increased risk. To that end, Citibank utilizes a scheme of customizable authentication, so that riskier transactions, for example, require different levels of user authorization. Citi’s corporate banking unit offers nine different levels of customized authorization.
In addition to coping with the regulatory regimes of 94 different companies, Citibank needs to stay a step ahead of fraudsters looking to grab a piece of the money flowing around the world via Citibank’s channels. Think your job is hard?