Happy Apps: Malauzai Designs Mobile Software For A Smile

Malauzai Software's new mobile app platform for community banks and credit unions brings analytics, gamification and social media to the equation.

Malauzai Software wants the mobile banking apps it provides to make customers smile.

The Austin, Texas-based company this week launched its new mobile banking platform based on the proposition of helping community financial institutions build "Cool SmartApps." That is, for Malauzai cofounders Tom Shen and Robb Gaynor, a little more focus on user interface, analytics, socialization and marketing can go a long way toward building mobile apps that will simultaneously drive customer adoption while providing opportunities for new revenue.

"We're not smarter than anybody else," says Shen, Malauzai's CEO. "It's just how you build these apps out. It's these kinds of experiences that bring a smile."

The three principles on which Malauzai's software is built are :

Social banking: Incorporating the concepts of social media and gamification into mobile banking could drive app usage, referrals and opportunity to cross-sell while incentivizing users to keep coming back.

Application Management System: Enabling banks to easily manage multiple apps that, within one deployment, can be customized to fit specific segments of customers.

Mobile marketing: Providing the tools for a bank or credit union to market and cross-sell from directly within the social experience. Driven by analytics, institutions can customize and target marketing to highly segmented audiences.

Malauzai's software is based on a pay-by-the-drink model and is designed such as it can be deployed quickly. It ties directly to core banking systems rather than online banking. The system affords banks the opportunity to experiment with mobile, and if it doesn't work, fail fast.

"We're invested in their success," says Gaynor, Malauzai's chief product officer," and we want to make them successful."