ClairMail Inc., a leading provider of mobile banking and payment solutions, has announced an update to the ClairMail mobile banking platform that extends its highly optimized mobile Web experience to Android and BlackBerry devices.
The ClairMail platform now supports a highly device-optimized version of the ClairMail mobile Web experience for BlackBerry and Android-based phones like the Curve, Storm, Pearl, Motorola DROID and Google's Nexus One, with plans to support other devices as they are introduced to market.
ClairMail has long provided mobile Web banking functionality on several hundred handsets, including the iPhone, with its proprietary device detection technology that delivers the best possible user experience based on each device's specific capability.
While Apple's iPhone has garnered much attention since its introduction in June 2007, RIM's BlackBerry devices remain the most widely adopted in the U.S., with approximately 15 million in use according to comScore. Google's Android OS, a newer contender in the smartphone market, has seen adoption double over the past year.
Taking advantage of the latest improvements in mobile browser technology, ClairMail's mobile Web infrastructure allows smartphone devices to provide a highly streamlined, application quality user experience without having to download an application. This highly optimized mobile Web capability is an integral part of ClairMail's recently announced Smart Client technology, a unique approach to the delivery of mobile banking on smartphones first introduced for the iPhone in September 2009. The Smart Client is a hybrid approach which fuses the centralized manageability of the optimized mobile Web experience with a small downloadable application which acts as a bridge to native capabilities of the device not otherwise available to the mobile browser, such as push notification alerting, GPS access and NFC capabilities.
"Smartphone owners are blazing the path for mobile banking and payments – they ‘get it' and use such services habitually," said Mark Schwanhausser, senior analyst in charge of multichannel financial services for Javelin Strategy & Research, which forecasts that 52 percent of mobile-phone owners will tote a smartphone by 2014. "But to capitalize on smartphone owners and establish themselves as mobile-banking innovators, financial institutions must quickly develop ways to specifically serve the leading smartphones, starting with the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-based phones."
