The two companies say they will move beyond the provision of basic account information to handheld devices, and instead develop applications to deliver more complex high-value, high-volume services such as wealth management, account aggregation, mobile trading, and credit card and payment alerts.

"Many of the wireless projects underway at banks and financial services firms today are in pilot stage, involving only a few hundred consumers and undertaken on a one-off basis to gain first-mover advantage," points out Mark Greene, vice president, strategy and solutions, IBM global financial services sector.

The challenge banks face is to deliver higher value services on a global basis, says Greene. The aim of the IBM and Ericsson alliance is to give financial institutions a scalable and secure end-to-end infrastructure for implementing high-volume services across multiple financial channels, he adds.

The joint offering will combine Ericsson Mobile Internet application building blocks such as Mobile e-Pay, Safetrader and WAP Gateway with the IBM WebSphere infrastructure family of products, including WebSphere Everyplace Suite, and the IBM eServer range. IBM Global Services will provide business innovation consulting and IT integration services.

"The alliance between Ericsson and IBM is a powerful proposition. Given the depth of IBM's relationships with the world's leading banks and Ericsson's pioneering work in the mobile commerce space, we anticipate great interest among the financial community," says Remus Brett, manager, financial services technology practice, Datamonitor. 'We firmly believe next generation mobile services are going to be critical for banks in the next two to three years. This alliance should enable banks to position themselves favourably regardless of future changes in networks, devices and payment technologies.'