BofA and Citi testing iPhone and Android for corporate e-mail - Bloomberg

Bank of America and Citi are the latest financial services giants to consider letting their staff use iPhones and Google Android-based handsets as an alternative to BlackBerrys for corporate e-mail.

Citing three people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg says the banks are currently using around 1000 people to test security software with iPhones. Testing at Bank of America is "advanced" and will be followed by a pilot and then, potentially, a wider implementation.

The banks - which both employ over 250,000 people - are also testing Android-based smartphones, says the wire, as they look to widen choice for staff, not replace BlackBerrys.

Bloomberg reported in September that JP Morgan Chase was carrying out tests before letting staff use iPhones and Android-based handsets, with UBS also considering the move.

In May, Standard Chartered revealed it is switching from BlackBerry to iPhone for its staff and Singapore's Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp has begun offering employees a choice between the two rival manufacturers.

Bank of America, Citigroup Said to Test IPhone for Mobile E-Mail - Bloomberg

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BlackBerry Bank of America Citi Google

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Mobile & online banking

Comments: (2)

Andrew Chilcott - stpsolutions - London 08 November, 2010, 08:21

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A couple of my colleagues in major financial institutions are already being allowed to use their IPhones with an App from Good Technology which apparently creates a secure virtual machine on the hard drive and links in to all of the corporate MS Exchange data.

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Daniel Goodman - Business Systems International - London 08 November, 2010, 12:37

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They must be joking. Has anyone ever tried taking an iphone on a business trip ? The iphone downloads emails in full. If someone sends you a 5MB document, the iphone downloads the full document. On vodafone, that would cost you £15 to receive the on email. Now if like me you receive 100 emails a day, the cost is astronomical. On the other hand, with a Blackberry, the data remains on the Blackberry server. So a 10 day trip with 100 emails a day costs me around £10. Even better, the Blackberry has some clever technology that converts PDFs and Microsoft Word documents to simple text. So the data hungry formatting gets left behind, keeping your data bill to a minimum.

On a recent trip, I took both an Iphone and a Blackberry. I switched off the data roaming on the Iphone and only used the Blackberry for email. I still came back to a £100 bill on the Iphone! Apparently, if you connect to Wifi on the Iphone and the signal gets interrupted, you default back to downloading via the Carrier network, despite having roaming switched off.