Thursday, July 07, 2011

BNZ mobile banking in the spotlight, but what is really happening in New Zealand?

It seems as if the new mobile banking solution developed by BNZ met with a lot of positive feedback when launched recently in Kiwi Land. The application and mobile web solution was reported to have been well-received in the social media and the iPhone app quickly rose to be the application downloaded most. (Read here). The bank must have done something right and reading between the lines, I believe that they treated mobile as mobile and developed a mobile banking solution, specifically designed for new requirements.

On the other hand, it could also be that this is a light shining in an industry with a mediocre and ill-conceived offering to consumers. Kiwibank refers to their mobile banking as being available to "phones that can access the internet" and to "use your internet banking access number" to do mobile banking (Read here). Whatever happened to the Kiwibank mobile banking launched in 2007 with "features not previously available anywhere in the world"? This was supposed to be the springboard for local technology company (Fronde) to tackle the world. (Read here).

Similarly, Westpac New Zealand refers to something called Mobile Online Banking on their website and claims that it "offers all the same services as online banking". Clearly just internet banking on the phone. (Read here).

1 comment:

Frans Stander said...

It seems like the marketing campaign to achieve buy-in from the initial test-customers was not executed pro-actively, hence all positive momentum was lost during the testing phases. On the other hand, it seems that there was not a true understanding of the solution they were striving for..