It was bound to happen. We already had so much of the commercial world experimenting in the telecoms business from supermarkets like Tesco and Seven Eleven, to coffee shop Tchibo and hamburger chain Hesburger and kiosk chain Narvesen, to periodicals like Financial Times and Cosmo Girl to TV broadcasters MTV, ESPN and Disney, to airlines like Easyjet (and Virgin) to videogames like Superstable and pop music bands like the Twins, Nelly, P.Diddy and Kiss. All of these have launched MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) businesses.
So far we had not seen a bank do it. Rather surprising, as so many mobile operators were getting into banking, many credit cards operate on mobile phones (Visa was first in South Korea years ago) and there are more mobile phone owners than people with banking accounts or credit card accounts. In fact youngest mobile phone owners tend to start at 5, 6 and 7 years of age, well over 10 years before they are even eligible for a credit card account in most markets.
Now the first bank has entered the mobile telecoms business. It is PrivatBank, a bank in Ukraine. I learned about this from a very good friend, Vladimir Dimitroff's posting at Forum Oxford at this link [Cross-Sector Convergence/Forum Oxford Mobile Applications Panel] - note that if you are not a member, you will need an "enrollment key" to read that posting (or to join and read the thousands of other postings by the 750 member strong new expert community at Forum Oxford - it is totally free of course, as the Forum is sponsored fully by Oxford University). Use the word "forumoxford" as yur enrollment key to go read the full posting and/or to join the Forum.
Back to PrivatBank MVNO. This step is likely to bring a lot of innovation to both the money transactions side of telecoms, and the customer insights aspects of customer understanding for banking.
A very fascinating development. We urge all bankers to go out and buy our book, and read the parts about Alpha Users etc - bankers (and credit card companies) had no idea this kind of wealth of customer insights is even possible. And it is only available from mobile telecoms networks (although you do not need to be an MVNO to get to it; any mobile operator should be able now, in 2006, to provide social networking data, such as profiles of high Alpha User score customers, from their network traffic data)
Now for a REALLY COOL tidbit. Talk about clever innovation - and this from banking, an industry not known for radically sexy cool high-tech innovations. MMS is a technology that allows advanced messaging on mobile phones. Mostly MMS is thought of as being synonymous with picture messaging. So when you snap a picture of the beautiful scenery you are seeing with your mobile phone, and then send it to your wife or husband through the mobile telecoms network, to her or his phone - that service uses MMS. Most think MMS is picture messaing. In fact MMS allows much more than that.
This is what PrivatBank uses MMS for. They accept credit card applications via mobile phone. The application form is sent as an MMS message. You fill out the form and click send. The mobile phone is identified definitely as yours, you provide your other personal data, social security number, date of birth, salary, address, etc like you would with any credit card application, and click [SEND]. There you go. The bank even invites its applicants to take a picture of themselves with the cameraphone feature and send that to accompany the application (and for further security).
BRILLIANT. This is a beautiful innovation in customer service. WHY do we need paper and pencil and post office or fax or visiting the bank branch? Or using the internet. Over two times as many people have mobile phones, as have internet access. Every economically viable person on the planet already carries a mobile phone! Anyone who might want a bank account or credit card account, has a mobile phone. And very rapidly, the vast majority of those are MMS -enabled. We can take all kinds of applications via mobile phone. Insurance application? Via mobile phone? Hunting license? Via mobile phone? Rental application? via mobile phone. Why not. Its the only universal interactive device.
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