The partnership will leverage Firethorn’s mobile banking and payments system to enable consumers to use their mobile devices to view account balances, check credit card balances, transfer funds between accounts, and receive and pay household bills. This service will be available in early 2007.
Matt Lewis, executive vice president and general manager of the CheckFree electronic commerce division, said that the mobile channel offers the potential to increase the frequency of consumers’ online banking and electronic bill payment usage while helping banks, credit unions and other financial institutions build and retain more profitable relationships with their customers.
Firethorn says that its downloadable application supports virtually any cell phone or mobile device. The application also provides multiple levels of security, including PIN authorization and lockout, contents clearing if the phone is lost or stolen, data encryption, two-factor authentication, and security via the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol. Even when a wireless connection is lost, the transaction will process automatically when a signal becomes available.
CheckFree said that it will host the Firethorn application on the same financial services platform that annually processes more than one billion transactions, including online, walk-in, phone and automatic debit payments.
