Kapow developed a mobile version of the Commerzbank site in 35 days, with almost no change to underlying systems.
Mobile Enablement Solution:
Banking
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Mobile-enable banking applications without writing any code
Mobile banking is no longer just a convenience to offer customers, but a competitive requirement. Smartphone adoption in the US is in high gear. According to IDC, nearly 267 million mobile devices shipped in 2010 - 55% more than in 2009.
Moreover, since the iPad launched the tablet revolution, more and more users are looking to these all-purpose devices as platforms for managing their finances. Financial services companies that deliver solutions re-conceived for these devices will gain significant competitive advantage - and market share. According to analysts, USAA now has more than 1 million mobile users, Bank of America has doubled its mobile users to 4 million, and mobile banking is growing at 10% annually, on track to surpass traditional web usage within a few years.
What this mean for banks is 1) immense opportunity and 2) immense challenges in taking advantage of that opportunity. It's critical to put banking services in the mobile hands of your customers to meet their expectations for anytime, anywhere services, but the challenges involved in mobile-enabling banking applications using traditional approaches can stretch projects out to years and magnify costs accordingly.
For example, Commerzbank took several years to develop its existing web platform using multiple system integrators and a ton of labor and re-coding. It would have taken the bank's developers more years to transform the web platform into a mobile platform. Kapow Software did it in a little over a month by wrapping the legacy banking application as an API to be consumed by a new mobile front-end. Read more below.
Featured Customer Success Stories in Mobile Enablement for Banking:
Challenge
- Commerzbank was under pressure from competing banks – and their Chairman – to provide mobile banking access for their customers.
- The bank's existing web platform took several years to develop using multiple system integrators.
- Having developers rewrite their existing web platform to transition to a mobile platform would take years and involve significant costs.
Solution
- Kapow provided an innovative alternative – instant web services.
- They wrapped legacy banking applications as a Java/REST API to be consumed by a mobile front-end.
- Using this approach, it was easy to create a new and highly optimized mobile front-end, with standards-compliant markup for iPhone and other handsets.
- Decoupling old and new HTML via a web service layer allowed for innovative new workflows and functions that didn't exist in the original banking application and are more suitable for small devices with potentially weak data connections.
Results
- Kapow developed a full functioning mobile website. The site is optimized for all modern handsets, including iPhone and Android, and is designed to serve XML/JSON-based web services for native apps.
- The mobile site was developed in just 35 days, without significantly changing underlying systems.