Kentucky's largest credit union is one of the first adopters of a new solution from Harland Financial Solutions that harkens back to those mist-shrouded days of Internet past.
Commonwealth Credit Union is using Cavion mobile web site hosting, a new service that offers financial institutions a quick and easy way to get up on the mobile Web without having to offer full functionality on that channel.
"What you have is a nice, non-secured landing page that can re-direct to the secured Internet banking site or to an automatic dialer," said Jason Marshall, a Denver-based director of product development for Harland. It also offers basic facts such as branch and ATM locations and hours.
In other words, a kind of brochureware for the mobile age.
While not his analogy, Marshall said the new service is "a stepping stone, an easy entry tool for the credit union that wants to establish its mobile presence but is not necessarily ready or able to afford the full-blown offering."
Commonwealth CU is one of 10 credit unions now using Cavion's new Web page hosting service. Another 70 clients, including about 40 credit unions, are using the company's Cavion mobile banking professional service for transaction functionality. More than 420 customers overall, including about 225 credit unions, use Cavion Internet Banking, the company said.
The template Web hosting site offers easy access to the most frequently requested items, such as ATM and branch locations, hours of operation and phone numbers.
"You don't want to bombard them with a lot of pictures and information that's not pertinent to them. They can always go to the Web site for that, and we'll probably add additional features and information as we identify them going forward," said Anne Burgess, chief information officer at $886 million Commonwealth CU (www.ccuky.org) in Frankfort, Ky.
Full functionality can easily be added later, the company said, and automatically navigates members to those services if the credit union is already using the Cavion Mobile Banking Professional solution.
Meanwhile, using the basic page eliminates the need for members to manually enter the secure protocol designation (https, typically) when accessing the mobile Web site.
"We rolled out mobile banking and the mobile Web page at the same time after we tried it out in a test environment," Burgess said. "The only real frustration we found in internal testing was having to type in the whole URL address, so we made it very easy. It's now mobile.ccuky.org."
That fact was another major consideration in the decision to design and launch the pared-down hosting service.
"If you launch a mobile Internet banking product without this offering, you can find yourself having to educate all your members to type in 'https://' because the mobile site is all secured. That means a lot of people end up calling the credit union for help because they don't know to do this," Marshall said.
"With this, all you need to go to market is something like 'creditunion.mobi' or 'mobile.your name', something like that," the Harland product developer said. "It's very easy to implement and gives you a quick presence right out of the gate with very little investment."
Burgess said about 600 of Commonwealth CU's 23,000 or so home bankers have signed up so far, and she expects more to come.
The mobile Web page is part of an overall effort to appeal to plugged-in members and potential members. That includes a page on its Web site specifically for younger consumers, featuring links to the credit union's presence on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
"I just think that all this helps us reach that Gen Y group. They live and die by that mobile device," Burgess said. "That was our plan and intent, to provide a delivery channel to that generation. As we look to the future, everything is going that way."
The Cavion service includes custom branded content, and in Commonwealth's case, that's not even necessarily necessary. "We're fortunate to have our own Webmaster in house who does our design for us, so adding content is not a huge issue for us," Burgess said.
Those who don't have that luxury will still find a nicely formatted, easy-to-use landing page at their disposal, one that "gives members a nice, cushy place to land so they can get basic information and not have to call the credit union for those kinds of answers," Marshall said.
And while it may not be "mobile banking", by some definitions, Marshall said, "When we talk about mobile to a financial institution, five different people will have five different opinions.
"Analysts of the world will be talking about a full suite of functionality that a lot of smaller institutions don't really have a need for," he said. "Their demographics don't demand two-way SMS with Web capabilities and all that.
"But they're still competing with that big bank down the street, so with this, they can establish a mobile presence. It allows them to get into that space with little risk and cost."
–mrapport@cutimes.com
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