Breeze

Always trust a Breeze to ruffle a few leaves, and a few hungry and grumpy bloggers on a Saturday morning for brunch(suppose to be breakfast but the spread was just too much to be labelled that! Please see upcoming pictures). Was invited for a bloggers event together with Jase over at Vivocity@The Queen & Mangosteen. The gourmet British eatery is very appropriate, given that it was about the launch of the Standard Chartered Bank's first iPhone mobile banking app called the Breeze.

Usually besides basketball and some geeky gadgets, I do not really bother to attend such events. But I am a StanChart customer and I do a lot of online banking, I was actually interested to find out what this app can do for me as a consumer. Oh and I forgot to mentioned that an iPad was up for grabs and unfortunately...I did not win!! Crap..some lucky dude won instead.

It was also unexpected to meet up with this famous expat blogger friend of mine...it was nice catching up and hear of his awesome plans for later half of the year. His picture shall remain as anonymous as his blog.

So it was a nice relaxing atmosphere as we chat with StanChart employees and it was nice hearing from Aman who was Group Head of Remote Banking, as he sat beside us explaining to us how this app was developed with extensive research into other countries' banks mobile apps as well as from actual consumers. As we played with the apps, we realised the little details and quirks which were incorporated within the app design making it very user friendly and at the same time safe. He explained how the app can be used to transact and pay bills, anytime and anywhere, you can check your account balances and even have icons for different accounts. And like most iPhone apps using the location feature, you can locate ATMs, Bank branches and even AXS machines while on the move!.

So as we chat, food was being served and soon our hunger and the looks of the food served got the better of us as we just ate and listen in. Here are some photos of our reward for waking up early and understand why it should be called brunch and not breakfast! The Queen does serve good tasty food!

Aman explaining how much customisation there is to this app, allowing users to view their account info by chronological order, list view or even calendar view! That's not all, there is also the intuitive Day/Night wallpaper which automatically detects the time of day and changes its wallpaper to reflect the scenes. This is way cooler than my internet banking! He goes on to show us the feature which I was most impressed about - the world's first E-Cheques which allows customers to enter a name and mailing address of existing payees of your bank accounts. And by just writing their name and click send, the banks will print and send the cheque on your behalf! This is also a free service, no more travelling or bothering with postage to mail to your friends etc.

During Q&A, Jase asked an important question highlighting the safety feature - once you click the home button, the app logs itself out preventing unauthorised usage. I hope for iPhone 4G which allows multi-tasking, this feature should be taken care of and also when there is a release for Android (already can multi-task!) which is the fastest growing Smartphone OS for now.

Try giving your phone a shake when you are at this screen! (I promise it won't all turn to zero!)

There is just too many features and quirks in this app that the StanChart team decided that we should all just try it out for ourselves - it clearly shows how much heart they put into developing just one app. You can head out to the micro-site which Standard Chartered has created to have a more detailed product description, demo and tips on how to use the Breeze iPhone app.

This is a free app for download. So if you have an iPhone and StanChart account and do internet banking, go ahead and give it a try. We heard there will be another version release in September and it was codenamed Typhoon!

Jase has more pictures and detailed blog entry of the event as well.