Sramana Mitra: What is your business model? Are you acquiring customers on behalf of banks or are you acquiring customers on behalf of yourselves? Luvleen Sidhu: We are acquiring customers on behalf of ourselves.We have two strategies. The first is a direct to consumer one that is pursued through PR, marketing and word of mouth.
This interview is an interesting window into how financial technology is addressing specific niches within the banking sector. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and BankMobile. Luvleen Sidhu: I’m the Co-Founder and President of BankMobile. BankMobile is the largest and fastest-growing digital bank that serves the underserved and low middle income
Sramana Mitra: And most of it goes into the garbage. Diarmuid Mallon: At best. Maybe they just get something from the headquarters of the store. They have no insight. Those vouchers sell products but gain no customer insight. So, we’ve been working with some consumer product companies and have found interesting ways to use mobile
Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the operators and the banks have a synergistic situation in most of these regions. Each of them is trying to reach the same customers. In fact, for the cellular operators, if they say that by buying a cellular phone you can also get into the cellular banking system, that’s another
Sramana Mitra: Can you walk me through the workflow of that? Diarmuid Mallon: What we have is the person who sends the money has a mobile wallet that has cash loaded into it. Now, I say the person sending the money, but it could be cash loaded by an agent, or the person could have
Sramana Mitra: Right. I think we understand the benefits. Would you talk about how banks are doing it? What is the architecture of the solution? How does the money flow? Diarmuid Mallon: What’s being done is that there’s a commerce platform deployed on mobile. Traditionally, when people talk about mobile banking, what they’re talking about
People can use their mobile phones to do just about anything these days, including personal banking. Founded in Berkeley, California, in 1984 by Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein, Sybase started out as a company that provided enterprise infrastructure and mobile software until it acquired Mobile 365, Inc. in 2006. The acquisition of Mobile 365 introduced
Sramana Mitra: I can give you a couple of use cases from our day-to-day use of online banking. Some of our clients still like to pay by check. Even though we encourage customers to pay by online banking or wire transfer, we still get checks. We then have to get those checks deposited, so sometimes