Carl Tsukahara, Clairmail’s Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product, recently contributed the following article to the 2012 Predictions Issue of Transaction News:

In 2011 we saw mobile banking and payments experience amazing adoption among financial institutions (FI) offering basic account management features – but 2012 will be the year mobile finance will gain strategic direction and FI’s evolve mobile initiatives to drive balance sheet impacts through fraud management, marketing and payments capabilities as well as look to expand deployment across the institution’s lines of business.

According to the recent Forrester report commissioned by Clairmail, banks see two areas with the most potential for reducing costs or creating new revenue within the mobile channel – fraud prevention and marketing to customers. Surveyed banks report that mobile banking is already playing a role in reducing fraud in a variety of ways—ranging from simple transaction and security alerts, to mobile authentication for bank transfers.

Still in its early stages, banks also report seeing mobile phones as a powerful marketing channel letting them make offers directly to individual customers around the point of purchase. Banks realize though that in order to achieve this they must integrate mobile banking with CRM systems, earn customers’ trust and address privacy issues.

Look for a pick up in tablet banking in the second half of 2012. One of the biggest challenges will be creating a unique user experience to go with it. Tablet banking can’t be a replication of smartphone banking, but on a bigger screen. Successful implementation will hinge on the ability of FIs to provide specialized functions that drive customers to new products and better service and utilize unique use case scenarios in each channel that leverages the attributes of that customer touch point.

While FIs look at the long-term management of device proliferation and deploying multiple/different mobile use cases, it will become increasingly challenging for FI’s to consider and evaluate how to ensure that they have a long-term platform that can manage inevitable expansion of mobile market and ecosystem complexity.