Citi has no plans to change its m-banking
strategy – despite the resignation of Liza Landsman,
its mobile and online banking head after just one year.
Landsman’s resignation is the latest in a line
of technical and strategic flaws that have blighted Citi’s mobile
services since its inception.
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Citi declined to comment on Landman’s move but when asked by
Cards International whether a new appointment would mean a
strategy shift, a spokesperson advised that Citi’s mobile services
will continue to operate in the same way.
Throughout Landsman’s leadership Citi has consistently
fallen behind major players such as Bank of America (BofA) in terms
of its m-banking users.
Richard Crone, an m-banking specialist and
co-founder of e-payments consultancy firm, Crone Consulting,
said it has been hurt by its earlier mistakes of treating
mobile banking as a single isolated channel.
“Mobile banking is more than one channel, it’s
16 channels that require active cross-channel integration and
management sponsorship from the CEO,” said Crone.
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By GlobalData“Yet the bank is siloed and has separate
channel management. This is the challenge that I think Liza was
facing.”
Crone said every figure in charge of
mobile banking faces these challenges today, but
acknowledged these issues do seem to be more prevalent in
Citi.
“[Citi] needs to stop looking at mobile
banking as a separate entity like they did under Liza,” he
said.
“It is not too late for Citi to get into the
mobile payments game, providing it gets its act together within the
next 12-18 months. It will then be in a position to fight the good
fight to prevent the loss of the next wave of mobile banking
customers,” Crone told CI.
The first indication that Citi’s m-banking was
struggling came when CI’s sister publication RBI
reported that the bank had only managed to attract 20,000
subscribers to its CitiMobile service in its first year. That
was compared to BofA’s, which had one million m-banking
users at the time.
An RBI survey, conducted in
conjunction with Crone Consulting, showed Citi languishing in fifth
place behind BofA, Wells Fargo and Wachovia.
It was only downhill from there. While BofA has recently
announced that it has reached five million m-banking users, and
currently sits second in Apple’s top ten finance app chart, Citi
doesn’t feature at all.
Last month, The Wall Street Journal revealed a security
flaw was found on Citi’s iPhone app, which saved personal account
information in a hidden file on users’ handsets, impacting the
security of around 117,600 of its customers.
