Commonwealth Bank Kaching app, Technology ,

Finally,as a customer,i have registered for "Kaching app'.Kaching is contactless paymentsfrom iPhone 4 and 4S devices to be available to Commonwealth Bank of Australiacustomers in less than a year.It combines HTML 5 and native iPhone elements including GPSlocation, contacts, and push notification.It enables not only contactlesspayments but also peer-to-peer payments through Facebook, email and SMS.Becausethe iPhone does not have native NFC capabilities, Commonwealth Bank plan to issuecustomers with an iCarte 420 case by Canadian vendor Wireless Dynamics.I havelearned that iCarte is currently being used by the Turkish Yapi Kredi bank andthe Coventry Building Society in Britain, in partnership with Visa Europe.

Kaching, which was developed by anagile, in-house team, relies on iCarte’s antenna and secure element tocommunicate with other NFC payment devices within a four-centimetre radius.Accordingto the bank statistics roughly 80 percent of Commonwealth Bank’s 1.4 millionmobile banking users used the iPhone.An insider who sent me the details saidthat the Commonwealth Bank wanted to design something that their customerscould use right away, so that the user experience would be identical to theuser experience once the native NFC and secure element came to the market.Thebank has already invited customers to register for Kaching in preparation for arollout within the year.

There are also planned to develop an application forthe 12 percent of its mobile banking customers who used Android devices but wasyet to determine a timeline for the Android project.For Kaching, Commonwealth Bank haspartnered with Apple, MasterCard for its network of contactless POS terminals,and Facebook to allow users to pay their friends.In my opinion,I think theCommonwealth Bank has been very smart because they’ve gone directly tocustomers.As my boss Heikki Makila told me yesterday,business is about winningnew customers and keeping them, not about revenue. This means Australian telcoswere unlikely to enter the payments space because a strong telco-bankpartnerships would likely fragment the market which Heikki equates to dilution of innovations.

Commonwealth Bank will track where andwhen Kaching was used although no sensitive data was cached on the iPhone.Analyticsabout what customers are doing, where they’re doing it and how they’reinteracting with others is something that lots of organizations are looking totake advantage of to provide offers that are specific to customers needs.However,therewill be no specific new data that Kaching will be storing but it is capturing alot of information about how and where customers are interacting and makingpayments.