There are now more than 900 banks on the “unofficial” FDIC watch list, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get an official list from the regulator. That’s because banking is arguably the most secretive of industries in the nation.

The secretiveness extends to banking technology. If you will recall, JP Morgan Chase & Co. suffered what could only be described as a catastrophic online banking failure at Chase.com last September. Why? You’ll never know, because JPM will not unveil the technology underneath Chase.com (a position I both understand and lament). 

This is why ING Direct deserves particular notice. Just yesterday, the technology underlying ING Direct’s mobile banking platform was made known. It turns out ING Direct uses Antenna Software for its mobile platform. The so-called AMP (as in Antenna Mobility Platform) serves ING Direct’s more than 7.5 million online banking and investing customers. Here’s how ING Direct’s mobile effort was described:

[ING Direct CIO Rudy] Wolfs wouldn’t divulge the exact cost of building the mobile banking and investing apps but said it was millions of dollars, with the majority spent on actual development efforts and maintenance of the apps rather than on the cost of the tools, which were provided by Antenna Software.

The mobile applications were conceived two years ago, but actual development took about four months. [The mobile app was released last July.] Antenna proved to be a good choice because it provided a core development environment called Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP), which enabled the building of mobile apps that could be delivered to multiple devices quickly and securely, Wolfs said. “We have the ability to write code once and deploy to many devices in a world of quickly changing devices,” he said.

Antenna CEO Jim Hemmer said that in addition to providing a means for building apps that work on multiple devices and networks, AMP can support millions of mobile transactions per day. AMP also supports data compression, which reduces data consumption by up to 90%. Antenna supports security capabilities as well, including encryption and user authentication.

The data support and transaction management seem to be the differentiators between Antenna and other providers, because there have been several build-and-deploy mobile app startups available to banks. (You can download Antenna’s industry “toolkit” here.)

ING Direct certainly learned from online banking years ago that technology is arguably the key differentiator in retail financial services. Its efforts in mobile banking deserve notice, and the fact that the technology supporting its mobile banking is now known deserves particular mention.