Mississippi Rising.

Since his days as a college-age, back-office worker, Michael Lindsey has turned heads with his technology acumen. In recent years he built a national profile, championing mobile services and payments as the future of relationship banking. As the electronic delivery services executive at Mississippi's BancorpSouth he also was keen on customer tactics, an interest that culminated in his new role as head of the $13.2 billion bank's retail arm. The Tupelo native now has the chance to practice the channel-integration strategy he's preached and show the industry how to make this second wave of mobile banking a winner.

Michael Lindsey's leap into mobile banking came with some caveats, as well as a cup of coffee.

Back in 2005, the BancorpSouth svp traveled to Atlanta to meet with Peach State entrepreneur Tripp Rackley, the president and CEO of upstart wireless banking vendor Firethorn Holdings. They gathered at a local Starbucks, as Rackley recalls, where the Firethorn team filled Lindsey in on the progress of their second-generation mobile banking application. The colossal bust of mobile banking 1.0 was only four years prior, when several major banks such as Bank of America and KeyCorp abruptly shut off their mobile banking trials due to customer apathy, divides with carriers, channel-integration issues and other potholes.

This time, Firethorn wasn't simply reformulating an online service, but building a dedicated mobile-only platform with the recognition that "this is bigger than Internet banking," Rackley recalls saying. "This is a new medium that's going to take a new vision, and a new strategy."

Lindsey, who at the time led BancorpSouth's electronic delivery services and chaired the payments strategy committee, agreed. But mission statements don't solve business and technical hurdles. To get BancorpSouth and other institutions on-board, Firethorn's system had to be a gateway, not a gimmick, that could lay the foundation for later progress in areas of m-payments, contactless form factors, and new product lines. That day Firethorn laid out just how that would occur: through an on-board, embedded application that would be integrated into a bank's existing infrastructure across processing and payments. The business plan would enlarge the ecosystem by bringing along wireless telecom and vendor relationships (such as Cingular and CheckFree, respectively), all of which Firethorn would supply itself.

Yes, there was big risk with venturing out into mobile banking so soon …