The number of mobile customers has not yet equaled the number of online customers at Regions Bank — but “the gap is closing,” said Christopher Cox, executive vice president in charge of digital channels for the Birmingham, Ala.-based bank.

Regions is also preparing to launch several new mobile products in early 2014, Cox told Bank Innovation.

Regions Bank holds approximately $120 billion in assets.

Regions entered the mobile banking space in 2008 with a basic browser-based experience, but, according to Cox, this early stage didn’t last long. “With the velocity of innovation in the mobile area, things evolved quickly,” he said.

In 2010, the bank “expanded, broadened and deepened” its mobile experience, Cox said, with an improved mobile website, downloadable native apps and SMS text alerts.

The third generation of mobile banking at Regions arrived in 2012 with a tablet offering and mobile remote deposit capture (RDC). The third generation app manages checking accounts, as well as card accounts, both credit and prepaid. Regions offers rewards in the app, allowing users to interact with and track their card-based rewards.

The bank’s mobile app operates on iOS, Android and Blackberry.

“We’re definitely seeing a blending of mobile and the traditional online world,” Cox said. “We don’t have as many mobile customers as online customers, but the gap is closing quickly. It’s important to keep consistency of design, consistency of experience, as the convergence of online and mobile continues.”

Consistency also counts in marketing. Regions promotes its mobile app on its website, as well as in most of its TV and print advertising. Associates in the branches, call centers and on social media are trained to discuss mobile banking. But, as Cox put it, “Getting people to adopt [mobile] has not been an issue.”

Regions places great emphasis on alerts as a personalization feature and a way to keep a customer’s account in good standing. The bank offers a dozen different alerts, all of which are configurable by the user, Cox said. As Jim Marous of Bank Marketing Strategy wrote last week, “As the use of smartphones continues to grow, push notifications are the expected level of engagement for ‘Customer 3.0‘.” ‘Customer 3.0’ was coined by Accenture to describe the highly informed, socially connected and mobile-centric (and often multi-device) customer for whom banks must now prepare.

These customers expect a personalized experience, from contextual ads in their Facebook feeds to appropriate recommendations from Netflix or Amazon. From a banking perspective, alerts play a role in helping customers decide how they want to interact, as does data. Customer data allows for a “differentiated experience based on segmentation,” Cox said, although he didn’t offer additional details.

Also planned for 2014 is expanded functionality for small business customers, including mobile deposits. Small businesses, often underserved and left out of the innovation mainstream, are seeing a renaissance in services as consumer mobile experiences are revamped and rebooted.

“We’re working hard to provide a good, consistent cross-channel experience for customers,” Cox said. “Mobile has changed the way we do product development. We now say, in product meetings, what kind of mobile features could we build around that? That’s now part of our product development culture. And where we have gaps between online and mobile, we have a strategy to close that gap.”