The mobile banking and payments industry in the United States faces many challenges, including positioning mobile banking as a strategic differentiation tool, integrating multiple categories of mobile financial services in a coherent framework, and the challenges of a one-size-fits-all-strategy.
Other challenges include offering a consistent experience across all banking modes, allocating resources towards pursuing new opportunities by taking a long-term view of the market potential, establishing strategic agreements with the traditional financial processing organizations to leverage their strong capabilities in enabling banking and payments, and providing in-depth reporting and feedback to the customer financial institutions (FIs).
Recently, Frost & Sullivan analyzed the mobile banking market, and has awarded mFoundry with its Entrepreneurial Company of the Year award for the company’s strong performance in the past 12 months and continued execution on highly differentiating growth strategies.
“mFoundry has emerged as a preferred provider of mobile banking and payment services in the U.S. mobile financial services markets,” notes Frost & Sullivan senior analyst Vikrant Gandhi. “What sets the company apart from competitors is its ability to continuously evolve in line with the changing needs of the customers and seamlessly update its platform with minimal disruption to its installed base of users.”
mFoundry has adopted a few highly effective growth strategies to achieve success. Firstly, it provides a capable, scalable and secure set of offerings targeted at different types of FIs (both large and small) with a clear, phased roadmap for associated mobile banking and mobile payment services.
The software offers one of the most comprehensive sets of analytics and reporting capabilities. Next, mFoundry has established the largest partner network in the industry by partnering with leading financial processors, credit card associations and other financial powerhouses – resulting in an average of more than 15 new customer additions per month. This also allows channel partners to rapidly deploy mFoundry-powered mobile banking solutions among their customer base
Most importantly, the company demonstrates a willingness and ability to refine its go-to-market strategy to keep pace with the rapid pace of evolutions of the mobile ecosystem – for instance, it continuously offers support for next-generation Smartphones and emerging devices to ensure a broad coverage for its customers (the FIs). Today, mFoundry works with more than 265 banks, credit unions, and issuers in the United States and continues to rapidly increase its customer base for both mobile banking and mobile payments services.
mFoundry has several innovations to its credit. It powers the Starbucks mobile gift card payment application in the United States, which is the largest such initiative of its kind. This has given the company tremendous credibility as it is the only m-banking company that has a live mobile payments solution of this scale in the United States. Other innovations that are in trials, or are already commercially available, include rich analytics, mobile remote deposit, mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, near field communications (NFC) implementations, and others.
“The roadmap for the competition’s services in mobile banking and payments is not yet clear, and mFoundry is clearly a leader when it comes to providing innovative, high-potential, growth-oriented mobile financial services,” asserts Gandhi. “The fact that leading financial processors are willing to partner closely with mFoundry is a validation in itself, and speaks volumes about the company’s aggressive pursuit of excellence on the product, marketing and sales fronts.”
According to the company, mFoundry provides value to customers in multiple ways. It enables banks, credit unions, and issuers to start using the mobile channel with ease and get comprehensive reporting and feedback to understand and fine-tune their offerings on an ongoing basis to achieve the best results. The company also provides FIs with avenues to offer a wide range of banking and payment services to all customers. Finally, mFoundry offers multiple deployment options as well as solutions that are modular and extensible platforms to mobilize the future mobile banking and payment services.
Be it mobile payments, analytics, configurable console-based implementations, or others, mFoundry has always been known as the ‘company to watch’ in the U.S. mobile banking and mobile payments markets. Its ability to introduce successful next-generation mobile financial services before others makes the company a key enabler in this space and the worthy recipient of the 2010 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Entrepreneurial Company of the Year in mobile banking.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated Entrepreneur Spirit by devising a strong growth strategy and robustly implementing it. The recipient has shown strength in terms of innovation in products and technologies, leadership in customer value as well as market penetration and speedy response to market needs. in short, the award looks at the emerging market players in the industry and recognizes their best practices that are positioned for future growth excellence.
Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.