Mobile Banking Awareness at Financial Institutions: The Grades Are In (NetBanker)

Two days ago (here), I wrote about Citibank's smartphone banking awareness campaign on its homepage. Coincidentally, ABI Research yesterday published a rating of 17 U.S. major retail banks plus a dozen community banks (see note 1) on "discoverability" and "accessibility" of their mobile banking services (press release).

Surprisingly, ABI rated Citibank "average." I'm not sure what Citi did wrong (note 2) to get a "C," but one common technique of all ABI's A-students (see table below), is a "mobile banking" link on the homepage (see screenshots below).

Observations:

Wells Fargo is the only bank to publicize a short mobile URL, wf.com (see final screenshot)
USAA is the only one of the six with an iPhone-optimized page rendered for users visiting its regular URL (see note 3) from the iPhone browser; this would be a minimal requirement for an A on our scorecard (if we were to make one)
Two of the six A-rated banks, BB&T and Northeast Bank, were also rotating a mobile banner ad on the homepage (see screenshots below).

Here are the ABI Research ratings:

Grade	Bank Names
A	BB&T, Eastern Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Northeast Bank, USAA, Wells Fargo
B+	Bank of America, Chase Bank
B	Capital One, US Bank, Huntington Bank
C	America First, Bancorp South, Citibank, PNC, Wachovia
D	Carolina First, 1st Bank, IBC Bank, Mercantile Bank, Regions Bank, SunTrust, Synovus
F	M&T Bank, Provident Bank

The A students (all screenshots from 10 Sep 2009)

Notes:
1. Another community bank with great mobile awareness is Farmers State Bank (click on inset right for a larger screenshot). Thanks to Laurie Goodlock at the bank for the tip.
2. We've requested the full report.
3. wf.com visitors also see a mobile-optimized site in their iPhone browser
4. Reference: Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking (Feb 2007) and Online Banking Report: Mobile Banking via iPhone (Mar 2009)