Customers and prospects often ask us about our mobile strategy, so I wanted to share our plans here. Currently, our users access our consumer- and bank-facing applications through a standard browser. A few pioneers access our applications from browsers on their smartphones, but it’s a small number and the experience isn’t optimized yet for the small screen. However, rather than invest in developing a proprietary mobile app for each platform, we’re focused on decoupling our existing user interface from our core services, and exposing those services to third parties in the form of a developer platform.
This is similar to what Twitter, Yodlee, and many other companies have done with their architectures – offer a user interface, but allow others to build their own UIs on various platforms for various creative use cases.
For example, some Twitter users access their service through Twitter’s own Web site (www.twitter.com), or their more recent proprietary mobile apps (Twitter for Android, etc). But many other Twitter users access the service through third-party apps like TweetDeck, Twidroid, Foursquare, and Seesmic. Some of these are desktop apps, some are mobile, some are Web clients, and some are not even traditional Twitter apps but rather unrelated applications that integrate specific Twitter functions into their user experience. Yodlee does the same thing – their customers (mostly large banks and personal finance sites) can either license Yodlee’s own end-to-end application, or if they want to offer a custom experience (e.g., Mint), they can write their own UI and integrate it to Yodlee’s underlying functions for payments, account verification, or aggregation.
Platforms are converging – the differences between mobile and desktop are way fewer than three years ago, and will continue to diminish until the distinction loses meaning. Today, what is “mobile?” Clearly BlackBerry is mobile. Installed apps for Android and iPhone are mobile. But what about mobile-optimized Web apps, or the upcoming wave of HTML5 Web apps that look and feel like locally-installed mobile apps? How about applications written for iPhone that run on an iPad — are those mobile? Apps are apps, device distinctions are becoming less meaningful, and things are changing really fast.
By opening up their systems and not betting on a particular platform or proprietary application, Twitter and Yodlee don’t need a specific “Mobile Strategy.” They leverage the ecosystem of third party developers to build apps for various platforms in response to market needs, some of which address mobile use cases. This is the essence of our strategy. We’re offering a developer platform to third parties, starting with select APIs this Fall and eventually encompassing our whole suite. We’ll work with developers of mobile applications, desktop applications, tablet applications, and applications for platforms we don’t know about yet. These developers will come both from financial institutions writing their own account opening applications, as well as from vendors creating apps for financial institutions or consumers.
Got an innovative use for our SDK? Contact me at ckroll@andera.com.