Ericsson and IBM are collaborating to make mobile financial services a reality. They plan to integrate their software and hardware to build a wireless infrastructure secure enough for consumers to do more than view data and gather information.

Mobile financial services today are mostly "pilot programs with a few hundred users and a narrow range of functions," says Mark Greene, a VP with IBM's financial services sector. "People want to do on wireless devices what they do at an ATM." This new effort will involve large numbers of users able to conduct financial transactions, he says.

He says Deutsche Bank will be the first customer to install the Ericsson-IBM infrastructure, including IBM's WebSphere Everyplace line and Ericsson's mobile-Internet applications, Mobile E-pay, Safetrader, and the Wireless Application Protocol gateway. Achieving interoperability with Ericsson's software is the first phase of the project, to be followed by embedding Ericsson's software into IBM's WebSphere platform, both of which are expected to be done by the end of the year.

Robert Buchholz, head of the GTS-TEC mobile business group at Deutsche Bank, wouldn't confirm whether the bank would indeed use Ericsson's and IBM's joint infrastructure, but did say that Deutsche Bank supports the idea of this alliance. Buchholz says it promises to create a scalable back-end infrastructure that will allow banks to develop flexible, multi-channel mobile services.

IBM's Greene did not say when consumers would be able to take advantage of the mobile financial services it is trying to make possible, but it may take a while for these services to become popular in the United States, Gartner analyst Avivah Litan says. Low bandwidth, small keypads, and smaller screens are just some of the barriers. "Americans aren't that interested in mobile financial services because they have PCs with big screens and relatively low-cost Internet connections," Litan says. But if mobile service providers such as AT&T Wireless, Ericsson, and Verizon have their way, things could change. Says Litan, "There are a lot of mobile operators who want to increase revenue streams and leverage their large customer bases."