Mobile banking strategy driven by Internet of smart things

While world is transitioning to digital economy, its Important to notice the rise of IoST (Internet of smart things). According to Gartner there are 3 trends driving Digital Business; And intelligent Mobile devices are at the centre of it:-

1. Democratization of Technology - smart things that will start to make decisions - Smart cars, Homes, Meters etc
2. The Physical and Digital Worlds Blur Leading to Dematerialization - smart things weave into our fabric of life - smart watches, glasses show direction, augmented reality
3. Disintermediation - smart things replace trained people - Robotic surgery, Drones, virtual assistance etc

As of now largely mobile banking is driven by smart phones, tablets. If the above prediction of Gartner is to come true, we will see a great degree of innovation in the area of Wearables, smart cars, homes & Drones and robotics. IoST will have decision making capabilities. we will see high agree of innovation in this space, with the advancement in API, CEP, in-memory computing, Big-Data, NL processing and machine learning, unstructured data search, advanced statistical modelling, connectivity, virtual & augmented reality capabilities.

Also, it's important to notice increase of number of sensors getting inbuilt into a mobile device and it will continue to increase as we move into the future. Mobile based services delivered and consumed is increasing at rapid pace. Things like location based services through GPS & i-beacon; Connectivity services through Wifi, 4G, NFC, Bluetooth; Audio, video, image, text I/O services; multiple other services using proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscopic sensor, biometric authentication are very common nowadays.

Mobile strategy is mainly driven at 3 levels - B2C (Customer Services, Sales, Marketing, Payments etc.), B2B (Enterprise Services) and B2E (Sales force automation, Employee productivity etc.).

I see great degree of B2C mobile services, many banks are even crowdsourcing the application development through public API and App stores. 

Not much was happening B2B and B2E segments. Companies like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce are exposing their products over mobile platform and individual corporates are building B2E apps like expense settlement, travel booking, sales force automation etc. But I think this segment is going to heat up post Apple and IBM announcement that they are coming together to build 100+ enterprise Apps.

While everything is moving so fast, banks need to take a step back and decide the mobile adoption strategy. Banks can not only drive core products and services, but also drive bank as access facilitator, payment ecosystem (from origination to settlement), drive e-commerce & value added services, and eventually become an one stop shop for human needs.

Banks should re-evaluate mobile strategy and relook below aspects while drive mobility adoption:-

 1: Vision and Strategy definition

• Market research to identify the trends and create business case (B2C or B2B or B2E) for ideas to simplify operations, improve time to market), improve customer satisfaction (NPS improvement)
• Create vision and roadmap for an mobile enterprise to improve customer, enterprise and employees experience
• Create a robust execution roadmap incremental and agile benefits to get stakeholders buy in and manage risk of failure.

 2: Use-case pilot & POC

• Adopt a user centric journey definitions approach for the use-case creation, consider every human to human and human to machine, machine to machine touch points and align to mobile technology (go beyond web interfaces to gestures, voice, locations, IoT etc)
• Build a Mobility Lab. Create prototype in lab & convince internal stakeholders before boiling the ocean. This is here you can explore the art of possibilities & fuel innovation. 

 3: Architecture roadmap

Create a robust architecture an technology roadmap. Make it incremental and agile to accommodate changes to any technology disruption. Some of the key points to consider while creating architecture strategy:-

• Resiliency - CLOUD (auto-scaling & self-healing etc), security, self-configurable etc
• Context awareness & decision making - BI (insight) and predictive analytics(next best actions), big-data & machine learning and cognitive capabilities based on location, user financial history & shopping habits, personal habits and social traits
• Client awareness & responsive design - Native, hybrid and web architecture (Phonegap, Apache Cordova, JqueryMobile ec), Responsive design standards (Bootstrap vs. Foundation),  usability & accessibility standards, push centric communication, Adapt to device capabilities standards - Gesture, Voice, motion, proximity, biometric, OCR etc
• Enterprise applications and integration - e-commerce, BPM, ECM (document sync, OCR, capture), HR, Finance, Travel packages etc. API and SOA strategy for back office data integration
• Performance Optimization - With more and more content reach applications are getting build a separate thought needs to be given on how to reduce data transmission & improve data caching through techniques like compression, elastic video, intrinsic ratio, avoid duplicate downloads, conditional loading etc. This is specially required to reduce cost entry barrier for smart devices and eventually help in IoT adoption.

 4: Innovation & monetization

• API strategy requires a separate call out due to its ability to expedite innovation and potential monetization of assets. Specially in use-cases in mobile Payments and financial advisory space, exposing API's to larger developer community (crowdsourced) could pay rich dividends
• Open source strategy - Open source across RedHat and Apache community driving innovation - be it big data (Hadoop cluster), or wrapper framework (Apache Cordova), or in-memory computing like Spark or middleware (Jboss - BPM, ESB, API etc). Right strategy in Open source might help to gain competitive advantage.

 5: Agile development & testing

• DevOps culture is very important for agility and time to market. Organizations must build Sandbox and virtual development and test environments on CLOUD (CLOUDFoundry, Rackspace etc). Build an integrated AML, continuous development, integration, version control, deployment, test framework
• Focus on automated functional & performance testing (Appscan, SOASTA, fortify etc), Compliance, Certification and Bench Marking, usability and security is key to release high quality of products.

 6: Security & Govn

A special consideration is to given to avoid legal and band reputation issues:-

• Data security - data masking, encryption
• App security - code obfuscation, SSL validations, multifactor authentication, run time injections
• Network Security - SSL and over the air encryption
• Mobile device policy - BYOD, inventory management, OS configuration management, deployment/update/removal policies
• Monitoring - remote view and troubleshooting, remote wipe, trouble shooting etc
• BYOD Mobile device management, Application performance monitoring, 2 factor authentication

We are moving from "Internet of people" to "Internet of smart things" economy. Right mobile banking strategy with equally strong execution engine will help banks to stay relevant and ahead of the competition.