iPhone is not goof for banks. "I don't know of a bank using it," BofA’s VP

While Apple Inc plans to make its iPhone devices enterprise-ready Bank of America allows running mobile banking applications on them with the reservation that they won’t be used by its employees at work. The main concern of BofA that withholds it from full deploying of iPhones is that there are no ways to centrally manage the iPhone as easily as the bank can manage BlackBerry devices from Research in Motion, according to Jamie Young, vice president of enterprise technology for Bank of America.

 

"We restrict users to BlackBerry, much to the chagrin of Apple and others," he said. While with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server he can easily shut off the camera function of a BlackBerry device because of the central management function of BES Young still wonders if there are management functions planned to come for devices other than BlackBerry.

 

A great number of BofA’s workers use BlackBerry devices issued by the bank, making it one of the largest BES deployments in the world. Meantime they can also use the iPhone, but it is only for their personal use, Young said, and paid for by the worker.

 

Even though there were some successful deployments of iPhone to the large businesses Young said he believes that the large businesses using iPhone are not in banking or financial services. "I don't know of a bank using it," he said.