Banking: The Surprise Mobile Vertical

Over the past two years of the .mobi domain, many of the first "verticals" that went mobile have not been a surprise because of the nature of their industries: travel (priceline.mobi), hotels (hilton.mobi), transportation (amtrak.mobi, sas.mobi, thalys.mobi) and dining (zagat.mobi).

However, the one industry that caught me unawares in terms of popularity has been banking and finance. Bank of America (bofa.mobi) is the probably the most active in promoting its .mobi site, but there are dozens of others around the world from lacaixa.mobi to deutsche-bank.mobi to usaa.mobi. It proves out a point that we discovered in the study we conducted with AKQA earlier this year: people are most interested in utility in their mobile sites. They're not against entertainment like games and ringtones, but rather that they see a mobile phone primarily as an way to help simplify the day-to-day administration of their lives.

The reason I'm mentioning this because of a press release dotMobi issued yesterday saying that California-based ClairMail has added DeviceAtlas to their service offerings.

ClairMail is a business-to-business company that builds mobile versions of existing banking sites, giving banks “transactional” mobile sites that tie into their back-end systems. Their customers include Alerus Financial, City Bank (Texas), 1st National Bank of Scotia, and Cascade Bank (Washington State). Now with the addition of DeviceAtlas to their platform, they can offer “device aware” mobile sites to their customers. And with that, we're sure to see the banking market continue to flourish as a prime space for mobile users.

Are there verticals you've seen going .mobi that have been a surprise to you? Let us know in the comments section.

Comments

[okok.com]

Heres a load more bank .mobi sites found in past 24 hours alone!
http://okok.com/wave-of-new-banks-adopt-mobi-websites/

[Bills]

wow, that's a hell of a lot of banks adopting .mobi! thanks okok.com

[New Developed .mobi websites]

another 4!
http://okok.com/yet-another-4-banks-go-dot-mobi/

[Jj]

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone at dotMobi! :-)
2009 will be a 'memorable' year!!!
Bring it on...
Keep up the great work.
Peace!

[James]

This is what I'd like to see from mTLD in 2009:

- Emulators updated with every mobile device that is being widely used for mobile Internet access.

- Individual Ready.mobi scores for all of these devices.

- DeviceAtlas promoted with every new .mobi domain registration (e.g. if I register a .mobi domain at GoDaddy, I want to be told that I get free DeviceAtlas (and other goodies) with my purchase).

- DeviceAtlas being promoted at every premium auction.

- Free DeviceAtlas "Professional Subcriptions" with every dotmobi premium domain name purchase.

- A step by step guide (like the recent pdf "The Best and Worst of the Mobile Web") about how to develop specifically for the iPhone/iPod Touch, G1, etc. and how to use DeviceAtlas, plus example .mobi sites that work superbly on these devices.

My prediction for .mobi 2009 - Massive growth in development and a lot of excitement :-)

[Great Leaders]

Looks like the banks are all doing it... because their competitors are. I read elsewhere that consumers do use these mobile banking services, but less than banks had expected.

The really interesting bit is mobile banking leading the way in places without terrestrial internet, and in some cases no banking or credit yet, such as parts of Africa.

[Jeff]

Undeveloped .MOBI's -- >> redirecting to .COM's!
priceline.mobi
hilton.mobi
amtrak.mobi
sas.mobi
zagat.mobi
bofa.mobi
usaa.mobi

"Are there verticals you've seen going .mobi that have been a surprise to you?" No, none. IMHO.

Which "verticals" will actually be developing their own (or using generic, auctioned .MOBI's) stand-alone websites?
We thank you for any insight.

[Jeff]

Update: My "undeveloped .MOBI's -- >> redirecting to .COM's" above was to be in the form of a question (using an "?" instead of an "!"), and I was very recently contacted privately informing me that Zagat™ has a device redirect set up that automatically detects the type of mobile device one is using ... and sends that user to the ".MOBI" domain, IHHO. However, if I'm on an cool iPhone I do not want to be redirected to a limited and "watered down" site ... I want the full & rich web experience and functionality on the .COM that the iPhone and other hugely popular smnart phones now enable, IMHO.
Thanks.