News

BBVA Compass to allow mobile enrollment from an iPhone

March 6, 2012

The version 2.0 iPhone app launched yesterday by BBVA Compassis the first to let customers enroll in mobile banking directly from their phone, even if they don't have an online banking account, said a news article at americanbanker.com.

Alejandro Carriles, executive vice president and director of mobile and online strategies at the $65 billion-asset Alabama-based bank said that this represented "a fundamental change," since most banks require customers to be online users before they can become mobile users.

"With online banking penetration from 40 percent to 60 percent of users, that means you're leaving out 40 percent to 60 percent of your customers that are not online banking users," Carriles said. "Younger generations are going to skip online banking altogether. They're going straight to mobile."

The new BBVA app has a simple button that says, "Register for mobile banking." Once customers have signed up and logged in, they can see graphically rich views of their finances — cash flow, pending payments, and more. Like many other banks' iPhone apps, BBVA's lets customers transfer funds between accounts, pay bills and view pending and recent payments. Customers can view transactions, receipts and checks going back 62 days, and can also create filters that let them see only the transactions they need at a given time. "That gives you total control of your finances," Carriles said.

Carilles said that BBVA plans to update its other mobile device platforms with the new features, and that the bank planned to add even greater functionality to its app with a new release every quarter. Next quarter, the bank will be looking at "bill payment on steroids." Carilles said. "We're going to go a lot deeper into payments on the next app, we will tweak even more on the dashboard screen."

For more information on this topic, visit our mobile banking research center.