When Standard Chartered Bank decided to develop a unique mobile banking solution, which would ultimately be named Breeze, they took a very different approach into the design and development. For starters, instead of offering their customers the same features and functionality seen with other mobile banking solutions, a tremendous amount of research was conducted directly with the customers. With this, bank officials were able to capture the essence of what customers wanted to see in a mobile banking application.
Beyond that, officials with Standard Chartered Bank realized that other online and mobile banking solutions simply did not provide the type and degree of security needed to keep information online safe. Obviously, if this bank was going to launch Breeze as a comprehensive solution, it had to be designed for the people and by the people, but the bank needed to put additional or different security measures in place so all personal and financial information would be protected.
Well, changes are already being seen in a new version of Breeze being called Typhoon. Standard Chartered Bank wants to be careful as they move forward with mobile banking, knowing they will continue to provide customers with the functionality and features needed to conduct personal and business banking but they also want to choose the timing for offering new versions carefully.
Additional information is important to understand, helping financial institutions identify the areas in which their system is weak. As an example, the amount of money allotted to IT departments for overall operations includes less than 5% being spent on training for security awareness. Additionally, of companies interviewed, as much as 90% stated the company had some type of computer security incident within the past 12-month period.
Because information such as this is easy to come by, it should be used by all businesses with online presence, especially for financial institutions. If more banks would conduct research and put appropriate security measures in place, incidences of cybercrime would decrease. For the people at Standard Chartered Bank, they wanted to make sure that when their mobile banking application was used on the iPhone, and soon the iPad, customers would have peace of mind knowing their information is protected. The way this was accomplished was to implement a type of second-tier protection.
The second change seen with the newer version of Breeze is that mortgage accounts, investments, and other loans can be viewed. The first version of Breeze was excellent but accountholders were not able to access accounts such as these. Now, the Typhoon version of mobile banking will be more liberal, providing the opportunity for customers to confirm the receipt of payments, changes in interest, current balances, and more.
The new version of Breeze will have another feature, allowing credit cards for paying bills. The first version was relatively flexible in this area but again, some limitations existed that have now been enhanced. The final change seen in the new version of Breeze is that customers can request to have the second, temporary password sent via SMS to the iPhone resent.
Initially, this second PIN was initiated once the bank customer logged into the Standard Chartered Bank website with the standard user name and password. From there, the customer would wait for the SMS to be received, at which time he or she would return to the site, enter the second password, and then have account access. With this change, if a customer were to log off only to remember another task needing to be done, rather than go through the entire process again, a request could be sent via Breeze on the iPhone, at which time the bank’s system would initiate a different temporary PIN. As time passes, more changes will be seen with Breeze, something of which bank customers are excited.