Financial services firms globally are investing strategically in enterprise mobile financial service solutions to deliver more mobile-based banking services and reduce the overall cost of operations. According to a recent survey by KPMG, mobile banking has already reached critical mass with 33% of US consumers conducting banking transactions over their mobile devices. This number is expected to significantly increase based on several trends. First of all, more consumers are becoming comfortable with the security of executing mobile transactions. Second is the continued penetration of smart phones and third is the rapid emergence of tablets as both a mobile device and in many circumstances, a replacement for standard desktops/laptops. (more…)

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with Jeffrey Hammond, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Rohit Sharma, Global Head of Mobility at Virtusa.  The topic was “Overcoming Challenges in Early Stage Enterprise Mobility Programs”.  This post is a short synopsis of the webinar.  For those who were not able to attend the session, you can view it here.

The webinar started with Jeffrey Hammond reflecting back to the early 1980’s with the introduction of the personal computer.  He offered his observation that many IT organizations are reacting to mobile devices and smartphones today in the same way IT organizations greeted the PC; with skepticism and doubt.  Today, the personal computer is a dominant platform for computing power, a major productivity tool and a huge segment of the technical market.  Hammond predicted that mobile computing will exceed the personal computer many times over. (more…)

Over the past year, few technology developments have challenged IT staffs more than the mobility wave.  Two years ago it was the social phenomenon.  Now it’s mobile computing.  Virtusa’s BFS business unit has seen a surge in the number of inquiries regarding mobile.  And now, the questions are not about “if”, they are about “how”.  Here is a familiar scenario.

You’re a product manager in a major financial or commercial company and you have just gotten the assignment of launching a mobile version of your product. You’re thrilled but you’re terrified. Your mind is racing. Where do you start? Pour yourself an herb tea or some other relaxing drink, realize that it will not be easy, and start planning. Even the organizations that appear as though they are miles ahead of you have probably only “mobilized” a small subset of their potential offerings. A major bank, for example, may be offering some exciting consumer goodies but, if you knew the mobile product team, they would tell you they have barely scratched the surface. The same bank’s B2B offerings are probably still on the drawing board at best. (more…)

In the last post we discussed issues faced by organizations while dealing with rapidly evolving media convergence. In this post we will try to highlight some exciting solutions to tackle the issues.

• Multi-Channel Publishing and Content Reuse: This is indeed the central theme of media convergence: organizations need to reuse the existing content and deliver the same across multiple media channels after content repurposing. Traditional content management systems (CMS) lack the ability to carry out multi-channel publishing since media like mobile or social media are relatively recent phenomenon. However using proper integration touch points organizations can get a start on this. Start small and gradually incorporate more channels to your content ecosystem. There are multiple mobile publishing systems in the market these days. After careful evaluation on features and interoperability with your traditional web CMS, integrate the two using standard APIs (application programming interface). Your web CMS will be the primary repository of content and its management whereas mobile CMS will allow you to repurpose the content with proper presentation layers based on device types. You can read more on publishing on mobile channel in this post. (more…)

One of the most rapid changes that are happening in the digital content sphere in the last few years is the explosive growth of new media delivery platforms like smart phones, tablet PCs and social networks. These newer content channels along with falling prices to access content (read falling rates of mobile services and device price) and an increasingly global business community present businesses with the unique challenge of serving up right content to the right people with the right context consistently across all the channels (e.g. print, Web, television, mobile and social). Organizations that traditionally served up content through channels like print or television suddenly are grappling with the challenges of sharing the same content however after repurposing to the new age media. As part of a two-post series on the changing issue of convergence of various media channels and how to tackle it, in this post we’ll discuss the typical content management related issues faced by organizations when multiple channels are involved. In the next post, we will focus on the solutions part. (more…)

It’s evident these days that organizations have started looking at mobile as a key strategic channel for reaching their customers enabling them to improve market share, increase revenue and provide a better customer experience. Before jumping on the mobile bandwagon, however, organizations need to take stock of the various challenges confronted in mobile publishing and plan to address them. For example, many organizations have found the cost of content creation to be unusually high due to different and unique processes for publishing on the web versus mobile platforms. Similarly, the different versions of content also result in higher content management costs. It therefore becomes essential that organizations look to improve their RoI in mobile publishing through a well- defined publishing strategy. (more…)