The number of mobile users are growing at an alarming rate, with a plethora of new mobile devices, mobile Internet services and powerful user interfaces vying for attention and adoption. The mobile web is not just about accessing the Internet from your phone; it’s a revolutionary technology and communication platform transforms our experience of the Web, the world, and ourselves.

Mobile devices are a highly personal extension of the individual, and have unique sociological and technological attributes – they are location aware, temporally situated, and socially connected. In the highly fragmented mobile space, it is increasingly important to offer consumers an elegant and satisfying user experience and mobile services that are intuitive, yet stunning and feature-rich.

However, if we look at mobile banking and the broader mobile industry – How do companies and individual developers create scale? By reaching users with the same products with the same user interfaces that run across hundreds of different types of devices, operating systems and carrier networks?

As the mobile banking experience evolves, it’s not about simply porting the PC experience to a smaller screen – the user experience and business requirements demand that the we create ‘mobile only’ products – services that harness the unique strengths and attributes of the mobile device while negating the limitations of size, memory, speed and processing power.  These value propositions will emerge to differentiate the mobile channel from the online channel and in some cases fulfill on a flicker of opportunity that began on the PC based web.  Examples include the mobile coupons that leverage behavior models, multi-factor authentication leveraging mobile channels or phone based biometrics.
When this type of unique value becomes the norm from the mobile channel, the question of whether to acquire a customer on the mobile first or service them on the mobile second will be irrelevant.