For much of the past decade, Todd Christy of Pyxis Mobile has been pushing the idea that mutual fund operators should conduct their business on mobile devices, such as the now obsolete Palm Pilot.

His first taker, in 2000, were the John Hancock funds. In the past 18 months, though, a monumental shift has taken place, says the Pyxis Mobile president and CTO. It’s no longer corporations that are pressing Windows into their networks and, in turn, into the hands of their employees.

The driving force is customers, who are adopting smartphones and now tablet computers—en masse.

Even Fidelity Investments Chief Wireless Officer Joseph Ferra finds the sudden turnabout “very surprising.”

But the numbers speak for themselves.

In the second quarter, 14.7 million smartphones were sold in the United States, according to an Aug. 2 report from market research firm Canalys. Of these, 32.1% were sold by Research in Motion [RIMM], which has long catered to the corporate e-mail market with its BlackBerry devices. Number two? Apple [AAPL], at 21.7%. This, even though it just entered the business in January 2007.

And had to survive the well-publicized “Antennagate” surrounding its fourth generation of iPhone.
Much has been made of the fact that Apple sold 3 million units of its larger-screen portable device, the iPad, in the first 80 days since its release. But Apple is on track to manufacture 3 million units a month of the iPhone 4, by comparison.

RIM fought back on Tuesday, Aug. 3 with BlackBerry 6, unveiling a new operating system that supports touchscreens and location features. And Motorola, which almost became a non-factor when it couldn’t replace its thin RAZR phones, is leading a charge of mobile manufacturers relying on Google’s Android operating system to win the favor of individuals “open” to the idea of using applications on mobile devices that have “no central point of failure.” That is a technical dig at Apple.

Business-to-Consumer

This has led to a shift in the last six months from a focus in the mutual fund industry on business-to-business uses of mobile applications, Pyxis’ Christy said. The new focus: Business-to-consumer applications.

Christy likens the adoption of smartphones—and now tablets—to the rapid adoption in the late ‘90s of the consuming public of the text, image and video content of the Internet.

Now, the customer of a mutual fund, hedge fund or other asset manager has the basic expectation, he said, that account information and the ability to conduct transactions will be readily available on a smartphone or tablet, with a dedicated application.

But there are differences from the last sea change in how customers used computers to access fund information, Ferra said.

“They used to say content is king,’’ the Fidelity chief wireless officer said. “What we’ve learned is context is king.”

With smartphones, uses are “more targeted” to short, fast objectives. Attention spans are shorter. And, the individual is likely splitting attention, even so, among multiple tasks.

The goal, for a fund operator, then, is to respond with only the most important information that can be delivered in an eyeblink—“before the light turns green,’’ Ferra said. Back in the dot-com days, the lingo was all about attracting “eyeballs.”

In Fidelity’s case, that can mean delivering a quick-hit “account synopsis” to customers. The four main pieces of information: The employer’s contribution to a savings program, the employee’s contribution, the current balance in the account and overall performance, year-to-date.

Fidelity is hardly on its own, here. Vanguard in October launched its first iPhone application. It recently rolled out an upgrade, which can be used not just by iPod Touch devices, but Apple’s iPad tablets as well.