Earning The Right To Mobile Money Solutions

What does it mean to move at the speed of mobile? To mobile money platform player provider, Monitise, it means delivering new capabilities that can help FIs differentiate while delivering new revenue.

And, that’s exactly what Monitise will do with the official release of its next-generation platform technology, Vantage 5.1, which hit the market on October 1.

“We’re really excited about the Vantage release,” Lisa Stanton, president of the Americas at Monitise, told Karen Webster, MPD CEO, in an interview. “We spent the last year really focused on making it much more modular, comprehensive and compartmentalized so that clients and partners that we work with on that platform are able to move at the speed of mobile.”

Chief among the platform’s new capabilities is its hybrid cloud, on-premises architecture, which allows payments to be delivered through the cloud while keeping core services within the FI’s “walls.” Vantage 5.1 also comes with modular components that let FIs evolve their mobile offerings without an extensive software upgrade, minimizing friction and expediting delivery.

All of these upgrades combine to create a platform that Monitise says offers FIs a way to take financial service to the next level by focusing on three core issues – convenience, cost reduction and development.

Here are a few of the other topics of conversation related to Vantage 5.1 that Lisa addressed in her conversation with Webster.

PYMNTS.com: How Do Vantage 5.1’s Bank Anywhere, Pay Anyone, Buy Anything Capabilities Work?

Lisa Stanton: Mobile banking has proven as a constant destination for consumers. On average, we’re seeing our registered customers access the application on a smartphone about 26 times a month, depending on the level of functionality the bank is offering.

That’s earning the banks the right, we think, to do more for more and more for these consumers, as they’re in the app now anyway. Compared to a consumer generally logging online once a week, now we’re seeing them almost daily in the app. This gives the banks the opportunity to say ‘What else do my consumers want from me?’ ‘Do they want the ability to make payments, to share money person-to-person or NFC?’

Those kinds of things are the next-generation mobile banking services that we want to enable through the cloud platform that we have.

How Does Monitise Plan To Reach FIs In The U.S.?

We have two approaches to the U.S. market… The larger financial institutions where the Vantage platform is really targeted directly at the top 200, top 300 FIs in the U.S. We work directly with [these companies] with our existing sales executives.

To get to the rest… we take advantage of the partnerships we have with the existing players we have in the ecosystem. FIS, is a long-standing partner of ours, so they’ll resell our service. We’ve got a direct and indirect approach to the market.

Can FIs With Existing Mobile Services Use Vantage 5.1?

Vantage is designed to help FIs compete effectively in the mobile channel. And since it’s so segmented and compartmentalized, we can do unique things based on customer demographics. Most institutions have categorized their customers in different demographics. We can target certain things to some of their customers, if they have another solution that is addressing the at-large customer.

We can also create a market competitive roadmap, building on what they have today, so it’s not a rip-and-replace opportunity. There will be some FIs looking at it and saying we’ve been doing this for years, we’re having a hard time keeping pace with mobile. In that case, there’s an opportunity to replace what they have with the full suite of Vantage services.

For more on how, Monitise is working to secure its data in the cloud and what the feedback on Vantage 5.1 has been, listen to our full podcast below.

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For more podcasts from the PYMNTS.com team, visit our podcast page here.

Lisa Stanton – President, Americas

Lisa is responsible for Monitise’s business in the Americas, including both the Group’s partnership with Visa Inc. and direct sales. Lisa joined Monitise in early 2007 to help set up the joint venture with Metavante, which is now part of FIS. Prior to joining Monitise, Lisa spent 16 years in various leadership roles with Citizens Financial Group, and has extensive knowledge of the US payments networks, affinity programs, and innovative payments advancements, including contactless transactions.