Navtej Singh of Tagit wants to be Asia’s mobile banking czar

If you’re using a mobile banking app in Singapore to review your finances, chances are, it is made by Tagit. Started by serial entrepreneur Navtej Singh in 2004, Tagit is a mobile solutions company specializing in mobile banking apps.

While it struggled early on for being ahead of time, Tagit is now working with many of the leading banks in Asia.

Their extensive portfolio includes banking apps for DBS, UOB, MayBank and Standard Chartered in Singapore, Commonwealth Bank and CIMB in Indonesia, Vietcom Bank in Vietnam, Citibank in India,  CBQ in Qatar, and RBC in Canada. In Kuwait, they have developed a mobile payment aggregator app in collaboration with a local partner.

This is just the beginning. Besides signing up more banks as customers, Tagit plans to go full-force into the mobile payments space by creating apps that aggregates merchants and lets users easily pay for their services. It is also working on an open platform to let developers build apps using their SDK.

Being at the forefront of your industry, what upcoming trends are you seeing in mobile and internet banking?

Adoption of mobile banking is growing rapidly in Asia, especially driven by markets where smartphone penetrations are high. The financial services industry space is very dynamic, with the banks leading the charge in development of mobile apps. More and more retail banks are looking into deploying mobile services to their customers, with each bank trying to differentiate their services from the others.

Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology adoption is imminent in Singapore. Banks with existing mobile services, or those planning to roll out their mBanking apps in the near future will be integrating NFC features to their mBanking services. Tagit has the capability and is already working with local banks to integrate NFC capabilities to their mobile banking application as part of the national initiative.

We can also expect to see greater personalization features used in these applications. This gives users a stronger, more emotional connection to the apps. This will be further augmented by convenient links to social networks built into these applications.

What kind of personalization can we expect in future banking apps?

We’ll see functionalities based on user types, look-and-feel based on user types (savings, cards, high net worth individuals), customizable look and feel based on the time of the year (for example, Lunar New Year, Christmas, and so on), customizable offers based on time, location, customer preferences, and social media interactions, such as things that you post on your wall, things you tweet about and things you pin on your Pinterest boards.

On hindsight, how would you have done your business differently?