“Best-of-Breed” Platforms Now Defined by Secure Mobile/Tablet Functionality and Fully Integrated Payments
To rank among the best electronic banking offerings today, a platform must securely deliver information to smartphones and tablets and facilitate fully integrated payments.
The addition of these two features to Greenwich Associates list of requirements for “Best-of-Breed” status in a report released today reflects the both the industry’s continuing progress in rolling out and refining new functionality, and the increasing importance of mobile technology in the fight for corporate bank customers and assets.
Greenwich Associates conducts hundreds of interviews with corporate executives around the world about the electronic banking platforms (Internet- and file-based) used and asks them to rate the platforms in terms of overall quality. The Firm also “road tests” the Internet platforms of major global and regional banks and non-banks to document the opportunities for development.
Based on this research, Greenwich Associates maintains a list of the key features and functionality that define “Best-of-Breed” e-banking platforms. “Because technology evolves so quickly, this is a dynamic list that changes along with the roll-out of new capabilities and the overall maturation of the industry,” explains Marc Harrison, a Greenwich Associates consultant and leader of the Firm’s Online Services Benchmarking Program.
Evolution of Online Banking to Best-of-Breed
The new Greenwich Report, Corporate Banking: Electronic Banking Progress Report, traces the evolution of online banking over the past 15 years. As recently as 1999, the report notes, electronic banking platforms were not really platforms at all, but were a series of unintegrated systems accessed through different screens and interfaces that mainly facilitated basic transactions like balance inquiries and payment initiation.
Over time banks added decision-support tools such as intraday balances for multiple account types, integrated administrative features for user entitlements, approval workflows, and status notifications on a single summary screen. These tools evolved into more sophisticated and customizable search features and predictive analytics with broad applications across customers’ businesses.
“Because the industry has progressed so rapidly, many traits associated with Best-of-Breed platforms as recently as 2008 have become table-stake expectations for all online banking systems,” says Marc Harrison. “Today, what truly differentiates the industry’s premier platforms is full and secure mobile and tablet integration and better interfaces and data structures that facilitate a more robust user experience.”
Regardless of how long it takes for widespread demand for full functionality through tablets and smartphones to materialize among companies, Greenwich Associates sees huge potential for efficiency improvements through mobile alerts, robust authentication schemes and other functions. “The question facing banks is not, ‘Is mobile relevant to corporates? says Marc Harrison. “Rather, it’s ‘Which of these hundreds of potential mobile apps, features and technologies will catch on, and how should I be optimizing my investments?