Will offering mobile banking impact branding for banks and credit unions?

I think it will, especially in the implementation. One aspect that I think will say a lot about your brand as an FI is which phones you support initially.

Are you a blackberry or an iphone or the free flip phone?

Will mobile banking impact your perceived relevance to consumers? Yes. Will mobile banking impact your brand? I’m not quite sure. I think it has more of an impact on your product offering than on the brand itself. However, it also depends on how successful you are with it (mobile banking) and how you tell your customers about it.

For GM, OnStar started as another service, but now I think you could say that it has an impact on their brand. When you hear OnStar, you think of GM because they have created that tie-in.

When your customer hears about mobile banking, do they think of your brand? or someone elses?

Generally speaking, there is probably a very narrow window of opportunity for the offer of mobile banking to impact branding for banks and credit unions. Today it is an emerging technology…tomorrow, can we say “me-too”?! BofA already has 840,000 mobile banking clients. We’ve probably all seen the recent data from Celent in Boston that predicts 30% of online banking customers will be using their mobile phones to bank by 2010. Last month an article in Business Week cited data from Javelin Research that 100 million US consumers will use mobile banking by 2012. This kind of data and the promise of rapid adoption by high net-worth and Gen Y customers is prompting financial institutions, large and small, to offer the technology… whether it supports their particular brand or not. If their brand is already based on convenience, the immediate effort to offer mobile banking will certainly support their brand position. Or if a bank or credit union is in a market where no one else is offering mobile banking they have a brief moment to add to the market’s perception of their brand (as leader, innovator, tech-saavy) before other competitors fall into lockstep. Will the failure to offer mobile banking have a negative impact on the perception of a bank or credit union’s brand? In certain markets, absolutely.