Consulting firm Gartner has given Fiserv a thumbs up for its March 1 acquisition of Mobile Commerce Ltd, known as M-Com.

According to Gartner, the deal makes Fiserv “the lead vendor in mobile retail banking and the clear leader of enterprise mobile financial services.” I hope the execs at mFoundry don’t read this.

Gartner touted the deal in a research note released yesterday. 

Gartner said the deal should lead bankers to once again “include more-traditional bank vendors, as well as mobile-applications vendors” in their product evaluations. Gartner said indigenous mobile banking vendors will now have to “demonstrate how they would respond to an acquisition — in terms of delivery, maintenance and product road map — because of the expected continued market consolidation” among mobile banking technology providers.

We can’t say whether the deal is transformational for Fiserv — or for other traditional banking technology vendors, for that matter — but the M-Com deal is certainly a sign that the old-school vendors have gotten religion on banking innovation. It was just last year that Fiserv published a white paper on social media and banking (I just found it in a stack on my desk), yet only months later it plunged into mobile banking head first with this deal. This is not its first foray into mobile financial services, considering that it has developed and delivered its Mobile Money product with M-Com since 2008, but this is a big step forward for Fiserv, which, at least to some degree, has been a party to the continued siloing of banking services. What role Fiserv plays in true convergence remains to be seen.