The successful platform providers,   Firethorn (Qualcomm) and mFoundry, have developed a platform that has been leveraged by the majority of leading FI's in the US.  They have been largely successul at developing relationships with the FI's  - Firethorn with BancorpSouth, Synovus, FirstBank, Arvest Bank, America First Credit Union, San Diego County Credit Union, Chase, Citicards and mFoundry with Citi, PNC, ICB, Zions, BB&T,  and others.  In addition, they've also managed to secure relationships with leading carriers, AT&T and Verizon to have their applications (either native or on behalf of a specific FI) downloaded from the carrier site.  Through a single view, users can access multiple accounts and, in some cases, transact within or between select accounts from different FI’s.  This becomes awfully dangerous for FI's as they compete for business and competition begins to drive prices even more for savings accounts or credit card interest.  Consumers ability to switch or transfer has become much easier.

 While the above "aggregation platforms" can provide access to transactional information; there are a number of offerings for mobile that provide value-added services to engage consumers; such as: a consolidated view of social networks and travel (PageOnce) or Personal Financial Management tools (Mint.com). 

PageOnce compensates for poor mobile website visualization and navigation by providing an account aggregation service that automatically downloads information and enables users to monitor and track financial and non-financial data.  The critical piece here is their link to email and social networking – making them a sticky option for consumers as the landing page for mobile.  Consumers can get summary views of the facebook notifications, emails and other social communications.  Unfortunately, this, in most cases, is more important to consumers than the state of their financial health.

Mint provides consumers with instant access to an overview of their entire net worth via their handset.  This free service supports more than 7,500 financial institutions and includes an inbound SMS feature that provides alerts to help avoid overdrafts and other fees and maximize reward points.  In a day where all FI's don't provide these services, this certainly makes loyalty to an FI questionable if the only value add is really bill pay.

Bottom line is that while online services from the aggregators were disruptors, mobile is like the wild-west where anyone can win.  In addition, solidifying relationships with key FI's and carriers will help the platform providers secure loyalty and page views.  FI's need to start adapting their mobile offerings to the segment most using their applications / mobile web site or risk losing eyeballs to emerging applicaitions that offer consumers more a compeilling value proposition (hint: BofA has done a good job on their iPhone applicatio by addition tip calculators and other innovative third party applications).