MobileWebsiteWatch

Discover® Card today announced the launch of a mobile solution for its cardmembers, Discover.com Mobile. This mobile version of the Discover Card Web site will allow cardmembers to manage their credit card account directly from their mobile phone’s browser.The new mobile Web site offers a simplified version of the Discover.com account summary interface and includes the following functionality:

• Make a payment

• View recent transactions

• View recent and pending payments

• View rewards activity

• Enroll in the 5% Cashback Bonus® program

While there are a few banks out there that offer mobile services, such as Chase (SMS only) and services like Paypal, for the most part this major function of that people need access to in their everyday lives and consistently report having a desire to do via mobile in surveys, is sadly underserved. Discover is making some great headway ion this space and clearly has a solid understanding of the market and its customer base.

“At Discover, we know that busy consumers are constantly looking for more convenient ways to stay in control of their finances,” said Sarah Alter, vice president of e-business and new markets at Discover Financial Services. “Discover.com Mobile provides a new service channel that allows cardmembers to have access to their account information right at their fingertips. Whether by telephone, Internet or now mobile phone, Discover Card is committed to providing cardmembers with the services they need at the time, place and method they choose.”

As more and more companies turn to using the booming mobile web channel to provide serives to thier cusometers, streamlined and mobile optimized products like this will continue to grow rapidly in importance use and payoff.

In a report from the Associated Press recently, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has struck a deal with a for-profit financial company to bring mobile banking to rural and impoverished regions of India and the Middle East. This seems like an amazing idea and I would not at all be surprised to see most major US banks start to offer similar services to cash in on migrant workers sending money to families back home and extending ther deposit bases to swaths of new account-holders.

The payoff could be big for companies providing these services. People who are now “unbanked” in China, India and Brazil alone could generate $85 billion in banking revenue by 2015, according to an estimate by the Boston Consulting Group. In January, India’s ICICI Bank Ltd., the nation’s second-largest bank, launched a mobile banking system. The State Bank of India, which has more than 100 million customers, many without Internet access

This to me really highlights how having a mobile optimized experience is an extremely effective way for companies to open up there brand to people on a mind-numbing scale. People in developing nations who are rapidly gaining wealth and will soon be buying up goods and services, cars and clothes and drugs and detergent, etc. The article points out:

Mobile banking could be another area in which the developing world leapfrogs the developed world, which is often constrained by expensive, pre-existing infrastructure. For example, countries like India and Cambodia have often skipped land lines in favor of installing mobile phone technology only…

“Today, it’s difficult to reach these people,” Obopay India Executive Director Aditya Menon said at a news conference in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. “If you solve that problem, you are enabling them to enter the economy.”

It just goes to show that the payoff and applications for mobile web technology today has barely scratched the surface.