case study When Singapore-based OCBC Group announced the launch of its mobile banking service, it marked yet another milestone for the company.
But for the team largely involved in that maiden voyage, it also signaled the culmination of many months of strenuous hardware and application testing as well as market research.
"It was an exciting journey," recalls Yvonne Cheong, OCBC's vice president of delivery for consumer financial services, in an interview. "Our first foray into mobile banking back in 2005 created a good opportunity for us to measure the market and understand our customers' immediate needs."
Earlier in 2005, the bank had partnered with local service provider StarHub to extend its consumer banking services on the telco's newly-launched i-mode network. But that corporate honeymoon is now over.
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With local consumer loyalties still divided across the different telcos and handset makers, OCBC's new business strategy is to reach out to a wider audience, explains Patrick Chew, head of delivery for consumer financial services.
"We want to make this service available to as many customers as possible," says Chew, adding that OCBC is now the first bank to allow subscribers from all the three telcos in Singapore--StarHub, SingTel and Mobile One--to access its consumer banking facility.
"But we do not see mobile banking as a pure standalone channel," Chew reiterates. "This channel plays an interdependent and complementary role with our existing suite of delivery channels."
As Chia Cheng Kiat, assistant vice president of delivery for consumer financial services, puts it, OCBC's mobile banking model presents a win-win situation for both telcos as well as the bank's technology partners.
"The more applications that can be used on the phone, the more different purposes the phone will serve for the user," says Chia. "And for the telcos, it increases output revenue per user."
Labor painsIt was not all smooth sailing, says Cheong. Like any project in its infancy, OCBC's mobile banking team encountered their fair share of complications, especially where technology was concerned.
"We went through some initial labor pains. [We discovered that] system and user interface design were limited by a phone's form factor. But we had strong IT support, and it helped us cope," admits Cheong, adding that the mobile banking system was developed largely by an in-house team of engineers.
Investing in technology that was familiar, Cheong believes, was a smart and cost-effective move on the company's part.
"We actually used Microsoft's .NET framework to build the back-end portion of our system and J2ME for the phone software client," says Cheong, praising the robustness and flexibility of both platforms. The .NET application was also previously used in the creation of the company's Internet banking service.
"Since we have solid and robust multiple channels riding on this technology, it was a natural progression. The technology met our requirements and it helped us move quickly in terms of application and system development. It would have otherwise taken us years--plus and arm and a leg--to do this."
But the company wasn't shy to ask for external assistance when the situation demanded it. For example, to ensure the new system was up to the new security standards set by both the bank and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), OCBC contracted several security experts to perform audits to identify potential "weak points" and to further toughen the system's overall security.
According to Chia, the project team went through months of hardware testing and security hardening before it even considered the system ready for commercialized deployment.
"We used various testing methodologies for security," says the OCBC executive, explaining that mobile phone security work on a set of rules that differed from Internet banking.
"For the Internet, we have encryption on top of the normal Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). It's the same approach on mobile phones--you encrypt and secure the data and information--but for Internet banking, the encryption lies between the browser and the Web server, and the tail-end is [sometimes] still vulnerable. For mobile banking, even this end-portion has been encrypted to harden security."
After some tweaks, OCBC's mobile banking user interface is now in its second iteration. According to Chia, the bank has thus far resisted the temptation to further lace the interface with multimedia add-ons, fearing it might lead to unnecessary technological bloat.
The project team had to test each and every individual phone model to make sure it could run the mobile banking client properly. "There's no shortcut, unfortunately," says Chia in resignation. "We had to go through the motions again and again."
Compared to OCBC's Internet banking platform, Chia noted, the mobile banking project required fewer human and financial resources.
"[Internet banking] uses a different technology, [thus] the different economies of scales," he added.
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