BlackBerry has long been the traditional choice of communication by professionals – but this could be set to change as one British bank has decided to replace the BlackBerry with the iPhone.
Standard Chartered is said to be giving its corporate BlackBerry users the choice of changing to the iPhone – and the company will continue to pay for work-based calls and data use on the same monthly billing basis.
Speaking to Reuters, a Singapore-based spokeswoman for the bank said: “It’s a group-wide initiative involving wholesale and consumer banks globally.”
The spokeswoman also said that the migration process of corporate email services from the BlackBerry to the iPhone began approximately a month ago, “although she did not know how many of the Asia-focused bank’s 75,000 employees used company-issued Blackberries or when the switchover could be completed,” Reuters added.
Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp, based in Singapore, started to give its employees the choice of BlackBerry or iPhone last year, although so far the majority of its staff have opted to stay with BlackBerry.
In terms of rolling this smartphone choice out in other banks, there are security concerns regarding making the switch from RIM’s BlackBerry to Apple’s iPhone. To-date, bankers at establishments like Morgan Stanley have been given only the BlackBerry for business mobile use – and making the switch on a wider basis may take some time.
Lu Chialin, an IT industry analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei, said: “If more companies switch to the iPhone, this is of course bad news for RIM. 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.”