Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
n
With its acquisition of a mobile-banking platform from Mobile Money Ventures LLC, Intuit Inc. has gained control over technology that will allow it to accelerate the launch of mobile products, the Mountain View, Calif.-based financial-technology vendor says. One new product on the way is a service that allows consumers to scan and deposit checks, an Intuit spokesman says, though the timetable is unclear. “Remote deposit capabilities are coming very soon, definitely in the coming months,” the spokesman says.
n
Intuit announced late on Monday that it had acquired the mobile Web platform developed by San Mateo, Calif.-based MMV, a joint venture formed in 2008 by Citigroup Inc. and SK Telecom, a major South Korean telecommunications company, to offer mobile-banking capability worldwide. Intuit, which had been licensing the technology and has 325 client financial institutions using it, concluded it could launch new services more quickly if it owned the platform, the spokesman says. “This will allow us to build things faster,” he says. “We have full control over design and support now.”
n
While the spokesman will not cite any specific products other than the remote-deposit service, at least one analyst speculates Intuit sees the technology as a building block for a mobile wallet. Competition in such wallets, which allow handsets to securely hold payment credentials and other media such as coupons or tickets, is heating up with recent introductions by Google Inc. and Visa Inc., and a planned launch by Isis, the joint venture controlled by the nation’s largest wireless carriers. The MMV platform Intuit acquired “would have the links to the telcos and the infrastructure to do links to the banks, and the only thing you would need that for is a mobile wallet,” says Aaron McPherson, practice director for financial services at IDC Financial Insights.
n
Intuit might also adapt some or all of the technology for its existing GoPayment application, which allows merchants to accept card transactions on smart phones. “We wouldn’t rule it out, but there are no specific plans for now,” the spokesman says.
n
Intuit said it closed on the transaction with MMV on Monday, but would not release a price other than to say it is “not material” to its financial results. In addition to the mobile Web banking product, Intuit is also taking on some MMV employees, though it will not say how many.
n
Where the sale leaves MMV remains unclear. The company didn’t return calls from Digital Transactions News seeking comment. MMV, in which Citi and SK Telecom hold equal shares, signed a licensing deal with Digital Insight, a unit of Intuit, in November 2009. But otherwise it has had difficulty in the U.S. attracting either client institutions or technology providers that serve smaller banks and credit unions, observers say. “It doesn’t seem like they’ve made any traction,” says McPherson.
n
Drew Sievers, chief executive of rival mobile-banking vendor mFoundry Inc., Larkspur, Calif., says the joint venture has suffered from banks’ reluctance to deal with a vendor partly controlled by another bank. “It definitely scared people off,” he says. He says the U.S. market also proved difficult for the venture, given that many of the bigger banks had already adopted mobile-banking services and smaller institutions typically follow guidance from their core-technology providers. “They didn’t have a clear, scalable integration path,” he notes.
