Five Questions With: Lisa Stanton

Lisa Stanton is CEO of Monitise Americas LLC, a Providence-based company that markets technology which lets people manage their banking using their cell phones. The company currently has more than 100 banks, financial institutions and pre-paid card providers signed up as clients.

Monitise Americas is a joint venture of the British firm Monitise Plc and Milwaukee-based Metavante Technologies Inc. Stanton talked with Providence Business News about Monitise and the future of mobile transactions.

PBN: What do you do at Monitise?

STANTON: Our software enables a mobile device to be the front-end to one’s bank accounts. Offered by a quickly-growing number of the financial institutions in the United States, we enable banks and credit unions to provide mobile-banking services to their retail and small-business clients via a single integration to the U.S. payments networks.

Our solution initially launched approximately five years ago in the U.K., and today is the mobile solution for some of the largest banks in the world, including Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Lloyds, and HSBC.

PBN: Who are you targeting with this product?

STANTON: Our strategy is to provide ubiquitous access for mobile financial management – any handset, any mobile network, any financial institution. So, if a consumer is using an early-generation mobile phone, we may use text messaging, or SMS, to communicate with them – i.e., an alert each time they receive a direct deposit into their account, or when their balance falls below a set level, or even allowing them to text the word “BAL” to our short-code so that we can return to them their current account balances.

Smartphones are gaining momentum, however, and, for the majority of those devices, including BlackBerrys and iPhones, we provide a customized, downloadable application that facilitates more advanced features, like paying a bill or making a funds transfer. We contract with the bank or credit union, and then the service is entirely branded with the bank’s look and feel.

PBN: What has the response been so far?

STANTON: There is little doubt that mobile financial services is a game-changer for the payments arena. From the consumer perspective, people demand real-time access to everything these days, and managing their money is no exception, especially in these challenging times. Being notified of potential fraud on your account via text message has been very well received. Also, an advisory from your bank that you’re about to overdraw your account, before being assessed the fee, will greatly improve the customer service levels we have came to expect.

For our clients – the banks, credit unions and prepaid card issuers – it is a new opportunity to cement their relationship with their customers, reduce the cost of servicing them, and ultimately help to attract 20-somethings who are considering where to establish their banking accounts – they won’t consider banks that do not allow them to manage their finances from their mobile devices.

PBN: How big a role do you see mobile banking playing in the way people manage their money in the years to come?

STANTON: Mobile is projected to become the most-used banking channel over the next three to five years. It took Internet, or online, banking approximately 10 years to become mainstream, predominantly because when it was first introduced, not everyone had a home computer or broadband Internet access. The mobile channel is quite different, as there are more mobile phones in use today than there are home computers and televisions combined!

The current state of mobile financial services is predominantly information based: checking your balance or whether your direct deposit come in, and transferring money from one account to another. The next phase, which is less than 12 months away, will move mobile into the payments arena – person-to-person payments, international remittances, even contactless payments made by waving your cell phone in front of a point of sale terminal at the store. Mobile will change both the tendencies we have towards managing our money, as well as the way we ultimately pay for things.

PBN: Monitise America’s parent companies are headquartered in London and Wisconsin, but your firm decided to locate its U.S. headquarters here in Providence. What was the thinking behind choosing Providence?

STANTON: Our two joint-venture parents – Metavante, which is scheduled to finish its merger with Fidelity National Information Services Inc. on Oct. 1, and Monitise Plc – partnered together to form Monitise Americas back in early 2007.

I was hired away from Citizens Financial Group to head up the new joint venture at that time, and being a Rhode Island resident myself, Providence was an ideal spot for our U.S. headquarters. Providence is home to a fair number of banks and credit unions, but it is also a short drive from here to Boston or New York, and without the hefty price tags for rental space! There is also an abundance of great talent locally, particularly from within the payments domain, which is where we focus. •