Is There a Pressing Need for Mobile Commercial Payments?

by. Jeff Fisher

From a consumer perspective, I wholeheartedly believe mobile is a necessary service channel.  I am all about mobile, but we are not hearing a pressing need from the wholesale banking community to provide a commercial payments framework on the mobile platform.  Outside of commercial cards and check, ACH and wire transfer are the minimum payment mechanisms ripe for web services.  Banks need to offer a comprehensive online commercial payments solution to the corporate customers they serve.  We discussed strategies to extend mobile services for commercial banking in our payments webinar on Wednesday. You can view the on-demand webinar and the presentation on Slideshare here.

If a bank has a wholesale banking division, commercial online payments is a recommended service you must offer, if you don’t already offer it today.  Even if commercial payments are presently an online services offering with your bank, you must ensure it is functionally comprehensive and structured to manage down cost along with risk to the bank.  Different methodologies can be used to implement new commercial payment functions or redesign your current online capabilities.  Hence, I won’t discuss methodologies concerning project management and software development.

To ensure your service offering is comprehensive, the following components are recommended:

Pre-Planning:  Creating a blueprint of the functions (consumer and bank-facing) your commercial web payments platform will provide is essential to getting the business and IT on the same page.

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