SunTrust Bank has turned to GT Software for developing the backend of its new mobile banking offering.

The bank is using GT's GT Software Ivory Service Architect service to connect front-end banking software on SunTrust customers' mobile phones with mainframe-based customer data.

"With this whole mobile banking application, we created zero lines of COBOL code," said Glenn A. Schneck, assistant vice president of online systems at SunTrust, Orlando, FL.

The mobile banking offering will let SunTrust mobile customers make balance inquiries, perform transfers between accounts and pay bills.

The service is available to AT&T and Verizon Wireless subscribers since the SunTrust mobile application runs on the Firethorn platform.

GT's Ivory Service Architect includes the Ivory Studio, a graphical modeling environment; Ivory Server, a processor with runtime service orchestration; and Ivory Server for Batch.

Ivory interfaces with Firethorn, which is hosted on mobile phones, to SunTrust's backend mainframe CICS/DB2 system.

"It's not meant to speak to a mainframe, it's just meant to ask some questions and get some answers," said Rob Morris, chief strategy officer at GT, Atlanta.

SunTrust used Ivory Aug. 1 to Oct. 1 for a pilot test run that impressed the bank.

"The installation and the ease of use of the product was by far the best that we'd seen of the vendors we chose for our proof of concept," Mr. Schneck said.

"We had two programmers within hours to a day learn the Ivory product," he said. "They in turn created a one-day internal class and have since trained over 50 programmers."

SunTrust Bank is part of SunTrust Banks Inc., Atlanta. The bank had total assets of $179 billion and total deposits of $116.2 billion as of March 31. It has a major presence in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

Like many of its peers, SunTrust offers branch, ATM, online and mobile banking. The mobile offering closely resembles the online application.

"A lot of the applications we use in the backend are the same for Internet banking and GT allows us to do that," Mr. Schneck said.

"We're using GT to create the Web service that processes the transactions in the background and then the front-end just calls the Web service," he said.