Sungard, one of the world’s largest software companies, has taken a dramatic turn toward banking innovation.

The company, which counts financial services software as one of its pillar businesses and generates more than $5 billion in annual revenue, launched an Innovation Lab based in Singapore about a year ago, and Sungard tells Bank Innovation that one of the lab’s first byproducts will hit the market this year: a retail mobile banking platform. Sungard expects the first “go lives” for the product in the first quarter of 2012.

I got a sneak peak of the new technology, called Ambit MyMoney, this week at Sibos, and it is super-slick. The app allows for extensive and rich mobile transactions up and down the funding/banking lifecycle. Dean Young, Sungard’s product management, vice president for Ambit Retail Banking, explained that the new mobile platform has three core elements of functionality:

1. Personalization (Young: “like Amazon”);
2. PFM; and
3. Social media integration.

One innovation I saw was allowing for consumers to trigger fund transfers or payments not by email addresses or bank account numbers, but by photos of the consumer’s social media “friends.” MyMoney will have full Facebook integration, Young said.

Young said Sungard is also “playing with” NFC, particularly to flesh out branch applications.

What’s significant about the Sungard release is that it will make available a rich “out of the box” mobile banking application to some of the world’s largest banks. I don’t see how any bank, however large, does not wait six to 12 months to launch an in-house product development initiative until it sees the retail mobile banking products being developed by the “big boy” software companies, of course Sungard is one.

There is one caveat to this, and several other mobile technology initiatives: they are not for US banks. The regulatory uncertainty in the US and the reliance on fee income by US banks is leading major software companies to seek clients beyond American shores. MyMoney will similarly not come to the US, at least not initially.

The Sungard lab, for its part, is unique as well. Sungard said it has invested in excess of $1 million in the lab. The company forms teams of 10 or so to go to the lab for 30- or 90-day exercises, where they map user journeys, think about the customer experience, and conjure up big picture ideas. The labs came about after an influx of young technologists joined Sungard about three years ago.

“This is not what banks tell us they need,” Young told me of the lab’s directive. “It is more what customers want.”