Mobile payments are becoming increasingly popular for consumers and most developments these days are focussed on consumers, however Fintech innovation in the corporate sector is growing by leaps and bounds.
Presenting at the Bank Innovation 2015, managing director and global head online banking and connectivity services at Citibank, Mayank Mishra pointed out that the sharp increase in global mobile device penetration had driven 80% of companies to institute Bring Your Own Device policies.
Mobile is inevitable, so enterprises need to deal with it. About 80% of enterprise user access to company sites and services will be via mobile devices by 2020, compared with just 5% of such use today.
Citigroup, for example, processed over $440 billion in mobile payments from corporate customers in 2014 as suggested in this report. Corporations are making their services available to employees via mobile devices, and developing the protocols to ensure the secure use of such devices in the enterprise space. This is true for institutions such as Citibank serving those corporations as well.
Citibank follows procedures such as splitting the creation and authorization of a payment between two parties, because, well, people lose their phones, even treasury managers.
Alongside increased speed and efficiency runs increased risk. To that end, Citibank utilizes a scheme of customizable authentication, so that riskier transactions, for example, require different levels of user authorization. Citi’s corporate banking unit offers nine different levels of customized authorization.
In addition to coping with the regulatory regimes of 94 different companies, Citibank needs to stay a step ahead of fraudsters looking to grab a piece of the money flowing around the world via Citibank’s channels.
Mayank noted that social networking and private cloud services are making multi- party processes like corporate payments more efficient. “Globalization is rapidly accelerating the need for social tools and platforms and more secure cloud-based systems for use by corporates,” he said.
(image credit: Jonathan McIntosh)
