Citigroup, the New York-based international banking services group, will begin rolling out the first phase of a global service in the last quarter of this year, which will allow customers to access banking and other financial services from virtually any electronic device anywhere in the world. The system, which is being coordinated by e-Citi, the company’s electronic banking unit, will be based on public key infrastructure (PKI) technology supplied by Sonera, the Finnish incumbent telco, and transport independent middleware developed by 724 Solutions Inc, a little- known company based in Toronto, Canada.
The Citigroup effort, said Alan Young, e-Citi’s VP of access device and distribution technology, will spearhead Citigroup’s drive to grow its 100 million worldwide customer base to 1 billion, but it will also be open to participation from other banks, carriers and merchant service providers. The idea, said Young, is to create a seamless international financial service network open to all comers, which will allow Citigroup and other banks to tighten their relationships with customers in the coming age of mobile communications.
The scale and, the likely cost of the Citigroup initiative is likely to be huge, but when set against the bank’s ambition to grow its customer base tenfold, Young said: The cost is almost immaterial. It is insignificant compared to the cost of building ten times more branches, ten times more call centers and ten times more ATMs, and then and employing 1,000s more people to operate them. Young’s e-Citi unit is betting that the combination of Sonera’s security technology, with 724’s middleware will convince other financial services companies and merchants to back the initiative.
The Sonera PKI technology, developed by the Finnish telco’s SmartTrust unit, is already used by several banks in the Nordic region, and offers a means of creating a unique and highly secure identity for individual customers, in a footprint small enough to be embedded in the SIM card of a mobile phone. Sonera will work with e-Citi and 724 to adopt the same technology to be available in other devices, such as games consoles, personal digital assistants, set-top boxes and even microwave ovens, Young said.
With just the world population of mobile phones set to breach the 1 billion mark by 2005, the Citigroup initiative may prove a major breakthrough for SmartTrust, which Sonera has deliberately set up to help it grow from being the incumbent telco of a relatively small European country, to global player in mobile e- commerce technology.
The association with e-Citi is also potentially very good news for 724. The Canadian company’s Geneva software will provide the essential middleware element to the e-Citi plan which will make the technology invisible to the customer, according to Greg Wolfond, 724’s chairman and CEO.
The partners envisage 724 systems sitting alongside the servers of mobile network operators and automatically identifying the type of device being used to access the Citigroup service. It will then bundle the content securely, and in an appropriate format for the receiving device, regardless of whether the device is employing a WAP (wireless application protocol) interface, SMS (the GSM short message service character-based messaging service) or some other, possibly proprietary, interface. We’ll support different interfaces according to market requirement, Wolfond said.
With 724 promising to make it painless for mobile service operators and financial service providers to support a complete spectrum of client devices, Citigroup’s initiative could snowball quickly. The initiative has already been endorsed by Bank of America and Harris Bank in the US and by Bank of Montreal in Canada..
The roll-out phase, scheduled for the last quarter of this will focus on Asia, but Young said in the first quarter of 2000, the scheme would be aggressively extended on a global basis. รก
