IBC Bank has launched a bilingual mobile banking application to better serve its large base of Spanish-speaking customers.

With the free IBC Mobile service, available in both English and Spanish, customers can have secure on-demand access to IBC checking, savings and loan accounts. Customers can view account balances, search and retrieve account transaction histories, transfer money between accounts, pay bills and search for IBC branches and ATMs.

"A high percentage of Generation Yers and Millennials owns a mobile device, so mobile banking is a no-brainer for us," said Kevin Mullins, senior vice president of electronics services for IBC Bank, Laredo, TX. "It's always been our intent to offer our services in English and Spanish to serve the diverse customer base that we have, and that will continue to be our strategy going forward."

With the new service, IBC Bank is targeting young people in general, and the large population of Hispanic customers that it serves both nationwide and in Mexico.

IBC Bank's mobile banking application is powered by mFoundry, a Sausalito, CA-based mobile platform provider for financial services.

The IBC Mobile application is available across carriers on a wide array of AT&T and Sprint handsets, as well as BlackBerry devices.

"We're working closely with mFoundry to expand that to more and more devices and more and more carriers as time goes on," Mr. Mullins said. "By the end of the year, we'll have two to three times as many supported devices as we currently have."

Earlier this year, mFoundry announced that credit union services organization PSCU Financial Services and ACI Worldwide adopted the mFoundry platform to deliver mobile banking services.

MFoundry also has partnerships with various other banking technology and payments companies such as Fidelity National Information Services, First Data, NCR and Affinity Mobile.

"The downloadable application from mFoundry was something we liked, because it's customized to fit the device and the model it's being downloaded to," Mr. Mullins said.

"With a browser-based application, you don't always get the same user interface, the same look and feel of a customized application," he said. "The presentation of the content of mFoundry's mobile banking application is much more user-friendly than a browser-based app."

IBC Bank, headquartered on the Texas-Mexico border, has close to 270 locations and has a strong presence in the central, south and Gulf Coast regions of Texas, as well as in Oklahoma and south of the border. It is the flagship of International Bancshares Corp.

The bank initially targeted its online banking customers for the mobile banking application. But it has expanded its marketing efforts to include television commercials, billboards, signage within the branches, a call-to-action on ATM screens and email blasts to its entire customer base.

"Mobile is an area we want to be involved in," Mr. Mullins said. "More and more of people's daily activities are through their mobile device, and it won't be long before their check-card information will also be on their handset, so they'll scan that instead of plastic."