Though most of the industry is still working on getting basic mobile banking up and running, Citibank, U.S. Bank and Standard Chartered Bank,  along with Mastercard and Visa, are showing the industry what’s next,  offering consumers shopping applications that combine location-based services with merchant offers to deliver coupons and discounts to consumers’ mobile phones, usually with the requirement to use a bank-branded card.

“This is a race to establish strong consumer engagement,” says Bob Hedges, principal at bank advisory firm Mercatus. “It’s important to have your consumers engaged with you mobile-ly; whatever gets them to do that is a good idea.”

U.S. Bank sketched the outlines of its “mobile concierge” service at SourceMedia’s 4th Annual Mobile Banking & Emerging Applications conference in early June, surprising the industry with the depth of its mobile plans.

Scheduled for launch later this summer, the mobile concierge is a location-based service so granular that it could send a toothpaste coupon to the smart phone of shopper who is browsing the toothpaste aisle in a grocery store, says Dominic Venturo, chief innovation officer in U.S. Bank’s payments group. The customer would then digitally “clip”  the coupon, which would store it in the mobile wallet.

The wallet works in conjunction with a…

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