St George gives sneak peek at app update

St George bank customers will soon be able to do more with their mobile smartphones as part of the bank's push to enable self-service initiatives via mobile technologies.

Speaking at the FST Media conference in Sydney yesterday, St George chief operating officer Andrew Moore gave attendees a look behind the development curtain at improvements coming for the bank's iPad and iPhone apps.

He provided a run-down of one such improvement: the ability to open a term deposit via the bank's iPhone application even if you're not a St George customer.

Moore told attendees that the process takes about five to 10 minutes to complete, with no need for a 100-point identity check at the time of opening the account. Moore told the audience that new customers can open an account and deposit money into it via the mobile, but wouldn't be able to withdraw said funds upon maturity or otherwise until a formal 100-point ID check had been completed.

The COO said that the same feature wouldn't be extended to home loan applications via mobile, however. The head of the Westpac Group's mobile apps team was in the audience, and said that all he needed to enable such a feature was the funding.

"Show me the money!" he called out from the audience.

The COO told ZDNet Australia that the term deposit improvement, among others, would be coming before the end of 2011.

The COO also revealed that the bank is currently developing localised apps for the Westpac Group's state-based properties such as BankSA and the newly minted Bank of Melbourne.

The Bank of Melbourne's app is something that is set to be deployed in branches, Moore said, so that staff can use it to tailor a brochure to a customer's interests and email it to them from the branch to save paper.