Tyfone: Plug-and-Play Mobile Banking

I have previously covered Monitise, a mobile banking and payments platform for banks that has been incredibly successful in tying up partnerships with UK and US banks, as well as partnering with Visa to deliver mobile payment solutions.

In a recent article, Pymnts covers Tyfone, a competing mobile banking a payments platform.  Tyfone was founded in 2004 in Portland, Oregon and is funded by Ojas Venture Partners, a Bangalore based early-stage tech fund.  They target banks and credit unions and initial traction appears to primarily be with credit unions.

In terms of product differentiation, Tyfone emphasize the folowing features:  

• Mobile banking for non-online bankers: enabling all bank customers, including those that are not currently signed up for internet banking to quickly sign up for mobile banking 
• Account aggregation: enabling the user to manage all their accounts from the same interface 
• Secure ID management: Multi Factor Authentication (MFA)  to ensure secure log-in 
• NFC Contactless Payments: a flexible mobile wallet

This is clearly a fast-growing market that will develop very quickly.  In my opinion the success of Tyfone will be less about the technical sophistication of their product and more about their ability to build a network of bank partners.  I.e. a player with 'good enough' technology and a broad customer network will have a great chance of success than a player with the most advanced technology, but a less developed partner network.

The market is definitely big enough for another couple of players, so it will be interesting to see if Tyfone will choose to focus their efforts on credit unions or if they will go with a broader approach to business development.