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Singapore. British bank Standard Chartered is replacing the BlackBerry, currently its standard corporate communications device, with the iPhone, a move that could eventually result in thousands of bankers switching to the Apple device for business communication on the go.

Standard Chartered bankers in Asia said that the London-based lender was giving its corporate BlackBerry users the option of switching to the iPhone, with the company agreeing to continue to pay monthly billing for business-related telephone and data services.

“It’s a group-wide initiative involving wholesale and consumer banks globally,” a Singapore-based spokeswoman for Standard Chartered said.

The process of migrating corporate e-mail services from the BlackBerry to the iPhone started about a month ago, said the spokeswoman, although she did not know how many of the Asia-focused bank’s 75,000 employees used company-issued BlackBerries or when the switch over would be completed.

Bankers at other financial institutions such as HSBC Holdings and Morgan Stanley have so far been restricted to the BlackBerry as the standard device issued by their firms for business communications. Despite some indications of change, it may take time for a broader switch to take place, mainly because of security concerns, according to financial professionals and information technology analysts.

“If more companies switch to the iPhone, this is of course bad news for RIM,” said Lu Chialin, an IT industry analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei. “However, it will take a long time for companies to do their own internal testing before deciding to change, so it will be a while before it has any effect on RIM.”

BlackBerries, from Canada’s Research in Motion, are the device of choice for bankers and executives who need regular access to e-mail and the Internet when outside the office.

“People are always switching. I saw there were people switching to BlackBerries as well,” said Gregory Shea, RIM’s China managing director.

“I think the point is it’s a very dynamic market. There are many very imaginative companies out there. Service providers, vendors, software application developers, very dynamic,” he said in Beijing after the launch of BlackBerry services by China Telecom, the smallest of China’s trio of telecoms providers.

RIM had the biggest share of the United States’ smartphone market at 36 percent, ahead of handsets running Google’s Android operating system, with 28 percent, and Apple, with 21 percent, according to a recent study by NPD Group.

Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation launched an initiative in June 2009 to offer its staff the choice of either BlackBerry or iPhone to access its corporate e‑mail. Now the bank picks up the cost of the data plan for its employees in Singapore, Malaysia, China and overseas branches.

“This initiative is not intended to replace the BlackBerry. Rather, we want to provide our colleagues with another option to access their office e-mail and sync their contacts, notes and calendar while on the move,” said Peter Koh, head of technology infrastructure at OCBC. “Our colleagues can continue to enjoy the features and content available on their iPhone without the hassle of carrying another device in order to access office e-mail.”

Meanwhile, some small, privately-held financial companies, consultants and law firms have also started allowing their employees to port corporate e-mails to their personal iPhones on request, bankers and asset managers have said.

The biggest issue for most companies choosing telephone and e-mail hardware is data encryption, said Macquarie’s Lu.

“RIM has a system that is more effective than most other handset makers, so if there is a shift towards the iPhone it’s not going to happen overnight but rather a slow and gradual change,” he said.

 

Reuters