Metro Atlanta firms help you bank on your cellphone

Think of your cellphone as a wallet.

A couple of clicks on the hand-held screen, and you can check your bank balance, pay your credit card and utility bills and figure out how much is left on a gift card.

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RICHARD WATKINS / AJC Photo illustration

Several metro Atlanta firms are helping to create applications that allow you to do your banking on your cellphone.

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On your phone, it will look like your bank came up with this idea. But two of the companies behind the hot technology, Firethorn and Fiserv, have a major presence in metro Atlanta.

QualComm bought Firethorn in 2007, and Fiserv acquired CheckFree of Norcross that same year. On Monday, CheckFree officially changed its name to Fiserv.

These companies create the software applications that marry large banks such as SunTrust with wireless carriers such as AT&T and Verizon.

Banks can cut costs by using an automated mobile service. Wireless carriers can tout another application and use it to drive revenue.

“Our primary focus is making sure that the financial institutions’ needs are met without them having to give up a lot of control,” said Calvin Grimes, Fiserv’s product manager for mobile money.

And consumers can ditch their bulging wallets because all of that credit card, debit card and other financial data is reachable via their cellphone. At least that’s the goal, according to Kyle Cochran, Firethorn’s director of product management.

“We’ve put banking on a phone. In the future, you’re carrying less, and your cellphone turns into a mobile wallet,” Cochran said.

About 3.1 million Americans used mobile banking last year, according to Mark Beccue, a senior analyst for consumer mobility for ABI Research, a New York-based technology market research firm. While those numbers aren’t staggering, there were fewer than 500,000 subscribers in 2007, he said.

Beccue said he expects the number to double to 7 million by the end of 2009 and balloon to 32 million by 2013. The latter figure would represent about half of consumers who bank outside of traditional brick-and-mortar branches.

“And I’m probably being a little conservative,” he said.

The trend of consumers migrating to mobile banking probably will mimic that of people who started using online banking, which began in the mid- to late 1990s, said Sean Moshir, co-chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association’s mobile banking committee.

But, he said, the MMA expects the number of mobile banking users to pick up at a much faster rate.

“Having that phone with you at all times, and those phones are always connected to the Internet, really, and that allows you to get information or send information,” said Moshir, also chief executive officer of CellTrust, a mobile-application developer based in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The idea of using your cellphone to tap into your bank account started during the technology bubble of 2000-2001, Cochran said. But people still were loath to use their cellphones for much more than just making phone calls, and the startups behind such mobile-banking applications eventually went under when the tech bubble burst, he said.

The concept came about again as mobile phones started morphing into major communication devices. But keeping information secure was an issue, he said.

“This is not a game. This is banking information. Those technologies needed to be there to secure that information,” Cochran said.

Wells Fargo and Bank of America were the first to break into mobile banking, Beccue said. Bank of America recently launched a television ad campaign with Verizon Wireless’ Blackberry Storm to promote the concept as well.

“Banking is one of the top online activities, and we want to make sure we address that need of our customers from a data standpoint, but really from a value standpoint, so they can access information when and where they need it,” said Caran Smith, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless’ Georgia and Alabama region. Verizon has contractual agreements with Bank of America and Fidelity and also offers an application used by a number of other banks.

AT&T began offering the mobile banking application to consumers of Wachovia and SunTrust. It has since expanded the application — which is either available or can be downloaded on a number of phones — to consumers of other financial institutions.