In case you hadn't looked at your calendar, it's Q4 everyone.  Time to sharpen your pencil, fire up your spreadsheet and create that glorious semi-fictional piece of work, the business plan.

And we at Online Banking Report are on your side. That's why every year we put every online/mobile idea we can think of into our Annual Planning Guide for Online & Mobile Banking.

This year, it's 84 pages long with a thousand or so possible tactics, tips, and strategic endeavors for your online and mobile services. But we don't make you wade through all 1,000 to find the six you need. The ideas are separated into three buckets:

• Best practices (5% of total): Must-have features to maintain parity with the competition
• Best tactics for competitive advantage (25% of total): Ideas that will help you stand out from the pack and/or drive incremental revenue/profit
• The rest (70% of total): Every company has different strengths and weaknesses; these tactics could be perfect for you

And we've also taken our favorite 20 and isolated them in their own section. Here is their alpha order:

• Activity dashboard/ticker
• Archives, long-term  
• Automatic alert enrollment
• Blog/Twitter and other social media
• Credit score/report zone
• Email channel
• Home equity center
• In-statement merchant ads
• Lending center
• Micro/small-business services
• Native mobile app (iPhone/Blackberry/Android)
• Personal finance functionality 
• Premium/VIP online services
• Prepaid/gift cards
• Retirement planning center
• Student banking/financial education center
• Text (SMS) banking
• Transaction streaming
• Ultra transparent (flat fee) mortgages
• Usage-based contests/rewards

About the report:

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2011 Product, Pricing & Strategy Guide for Online & Mobile Banking (link)
Will online banking fees make a comeback?

Author: Jim Bruene, editor & founder

Published: 30 Sep. 2010

Length: 84 pages

Cost: No extra charge to OBR subscribers, $695 for others here

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