First Tennessee Adopts Corporate Mobile Banking Solution

The bank recently rolled out the Sybase 365 Corporate Mobile Banking Solution to allow its business customers access to on-the-go cash flow operations management.
First Tennessee Bank, a $25 billion institution based in Memphis, Tenn., introduced mobile banking to its retail customers last year. After having success with that rollout, execs decided to also give mobile banking to the institution's corporate customers. The bank went with the Sybase 365 Corporate Mobile Banking Solution and introduced it to customers last June.

First Tennessee wasn't seeing a huge demand from its business customers for mobile banking, but the bank decided to offer it anyway to stay ahead of the curve, according to Taylor Vaughan, director of treasury management services for the bank. "We're definitely looking at this as a go-forward strategy," he explains. "What we're really trying to do is make sure that it's convenient for our customers to do business with us -- that was our primary motivation," he explains.

The Sybase 365 Corporate Mobile Banking Solution allows business owners and CFOs to approve transfers, check balances and handle other cash flow operations from anywhere using any mobile device. Vaughan says that he sees the solution as being especially helpful to small business owners who can't always be at their shops -- a big part of First Tennessee's customer base.

Although the bank already had the Sybase Financial Fusion e-Banking (FFI) solution in place for online banking, his team didn't discount other vendor options. (The bank actually uses a different vendor, mFoundry, for its retail banking solution). "We had presentations from other vendors, but [Sybase] won out because it did plug so seamlessly into our infrastructure," says Vaughan.

The entire decision-making process, installation and rollout only took eight or nine months. As for the installation, says Vaughan, "It's more about what we didn't have to do instead of what we did have to do to get this thing implemented. If we went with a different vendor I would've had to build all of the interfaces that connect us to our positive pay system that would connect us to our balances, transactions, image archives, lock box totals, disbursement totals, etc., for a mobile banking application."

Instead of going with a traditional mobile application, First Tennessee opted to go with a browser that looks like an app for its mobile solution. Sybase's browser solution allows banks to put a mobile solution on all major devices without having to develop different apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, etc., and having to go through the different approval processes for the app stores. The product has as an automatic device detection rendering IP that will pull the right browser template based on the device's capabilities.

"We made it so any online banking customer automatically has access to this system," says Vaughan. "There's no registration process required because it's just another device accessing the online banking system; our customers get access through their mobile devices to all of the same things that they can get online." He adds, "We put this thing on a virtual server, so we didn't have to buy any hardware. We just created that one interface to our online banking system."

Andrew Mikesell, Director of mCommerce Product Management at Sybase, says that he's seeing a lot of banks going the mobile browser route for its convenience and because it allows them to have more control. "The banks have said, 'If we do mobile banking with a mobile browser then we control it. It sits within our data center or with our provider, we have the domain, the URL, we own that,'" he explains.

The mobile browser solution also makes the security aspect of a mobile solution much easier for a bank. "The browser-based approach leverages all of the existing security standards and protocols already in place at most banks for their online channel. It's just an online channel that's on the phone," explains Mikesell. "The app is a little different because it's an actual application on the phone, and banks are still struggling with what they need to do from a security standpoint with that model."

So far, First Tennessee has had favorable feedback from customers. "They say it's very intuitive and very easy to use," says Vaughan. "We were pleasantly surprised that when customers looked at it, they said, 'Oh, I thought this was a browser. It looks like an iPhone app.' It really is a browser, but we designed it to look just like an app. And it operates just like an app."

Despite the positive initial response, though, Vaughan says the bank isn't expecting to see an immediate ROI or heavy adoption from its corporate client base with its mobile banking solution right off the bat. "Being in the 5- to 10-percent adoption range over the next year or two is about what we would expect," he says. "As folks learn more about it we'll see more adoption."