Last week, we published an article about how a bank could leverage all the hoopla surrounding Apple's iPhone (here). Surprisingly, Steve Jobs made that job much easier this week, when he told the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference that standard website coding that works on its Safari browser will work on the iPhone out of the box. No special development tools are necessary.

However, at this time Apple is NOT allowing programmers to develop applications that run directly on the iPhone without launching the browser. Every application must run through Safari.* Here's a post from Salon discusses the pros and cons. All-in-all, good news for financial institutions wanting iPhone compatible offerings.  

So go ahead and start building your Safari-optimized 336 x 168 by webpage. Make sure you drop a few nifty icons on the page so Mac users feel at home (see inset). Extra credit if you launch the page on 5:59 PM EDT June 29, 1 minute before the iPhone goes on sale on the East Coast.

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*And to make life a bit easier, Apple will produce a Windows version of Safari.

P.S. For those of you who want to understand the broader mobile banking trend and how the iPhone fits into it, check out the new mobile banking report from Online Banking Report.