Does the new Mozilla smartphone operating system matter to banking?

Mozilla, purveyor of the Firefox web browser, announced last Monday that it would release a smartphone, called the ZTE Open, with Telefonica, the Latin America telecom company, with a Mozilla-built operating system called Firefox OS. Mozilla said the phone will be cheap ($90 to buy the phone; $3 per month usage fee).

Firefox has around 450 million users – that’s a lot of users. Could Firefox OS, first through the ZTE Open, gain widespread adoption and become a “third smartphone platform” to iOS and Android? If it did, it would have great import to the banking industry.

Banking industry professionals we pinged acknowledged that the phones could have more relevance to the underbanked market segment, because the phones are inexpensive, but that’s largely where it ends. The ZTE Open will not be NFC-enabled (not that that matters in banking today; NFC, as has been said elsewhere, might as well stand for No one F**king Cares). It does not appear as though a bank has built an app for Firefox OS – although this is obviously a new platform.

But more crucially, as Yann Ranchere, the banking consultant and Bank Innovation friend, told us, it is difficult to foresee a major correlation in sales of ZTE Opens between the number of Firefox users and the number of people who will buy the new smartphone. The fact that Mozilla is distributing ZTE Open via Telefonica further indicates to Ranchere (and to us) that this might be more of a brand play than a leveraging of the Firefox customer based.

Firefox OS is certainly not on bankers’ radar. Bradley Leimer, at Mechanics Bank, for one, does not believe Firefox OS will “break the duopoly” of iOS and Android.

“People know it’s a two-horse race,” Leimer said. “I wish them luck, because historically we owe a lot to Mozilla and the open-source development movement that they really embraced. I hope it becomes an alternative, but I have my doubts.”

Bankers will be swayed by adoption, little else. If bankers have their doubts, there is little reason to think the virtuous circle of adoption-development-adoption will begin soon for Firefox OS.