DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 24)

T& TRANSACT & REMIT R Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You… t he arrival of mobile banking and payment technology has been much heralded in the industry. However, how you reach out to your customers with mobile options is the key. Offering real value, via alerts and notiﬁcations, to your customers will save the mobile vehicle from the same fate that email suffered. t The real way to offer mobile banking and payment beneﬁts to your customers By Roger W. Applewhite little or no computational logic installed. However, digital technology miniaturized, and much of the functionality of the “cell” phone, with its signal switching and tower-to-tower “handover,” became possible on a large scale. Soon, microprocessors themselves became small and cheap enough to place into a phone, and further advances, such as 2G digital communications, in the middle 90s became a part of the landscape. Adding microprocessors, however, was a bit like opening Pandora’s Box. Small, fairly powerful computational devices were now in the hands of millions of people, and these devices could communicate to remote computers via a vast network. The potency of this infrastructure was almost immediately recognized by strategists in several industries, not the least of which was ﬁnancial services. The problem for these entrepreneurs and forward-thinkers, as it was for Bell and Edison, was to create a paradigm for this technology that could be appreciated by the average consumer. Unfortunately, as it was at the turn of the century, it is today: An existing application of a similar technology was adopted as a model, but that model didn’t ﬁt. The telegraph, with its ﬁxed stations connected by lines, seemed the obvious way to deploy the technology of the telephone. The personal computer (PC), with its browser-based interface allowing a user to ﬁnd, connect to and interact with data, is the exemplar used by almost every application of mobile banking and payments today. Unfortunately, the telegraph model obscured the networking potential of the telephone, and the PC is doing the same with mobile. While it may be a tautology to say that a mobile phone’s primary value is mobility, the idea is oddly lost on most providers and deployers of mobile Technological advances are sometimes the offspring of necessity, as the saying goes. In light of the Industrial Revolution, gaining steam as it were, the invention of the cotton gin seems to us now a foregone conclusion. Other inventions of the time, however, ﬂowered in a way their inventors did not suppose. One such invention — the telephone — became universal in a manner not initially suspected by Alexander Graham Bell. Most late 19th century embodiments of the idea concerned two devices connected by wires. The purchaser would acquire the devices and have them installed at ﬁxed endpoints. Permanent, point-to-point communication was the goal. Therefore, most of the technological advancement of early telephony had to do with converting sound to electrical signals and back again, not how the devices were connected. The environment of the telephone’s application, however, generated a new necessity to interconnect many devices to make communication more useful, and the exchange was born. To their credit, Bell, Thomas Edison and others quickly understood the primacy of networking and applied their efforts there. As a result, the advancement of handset design slowed. In fact, the carbon transmitter used in the mouthpieces of early telephones remained largely unchanged for decades. The Mobile Connection We are again at such a point with the mobile telephone. Originally conceived and designed as an analog device, radio telephones had 24 document april.08 www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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