Standard Chartered bankers in Asia told Reuters that the bank was giving its corporate Blackberry users the option of switching to the iPhone, with the company agreeing to continue to pay monthly billing for business-related telephone and data services.

“It’s a group-wide initiative involving wholesale and consumer banks globally,” said a Singapore-based spokeswoman for Standard Chartered. The spokeswoman declined to be identified due to company policy.

The process of migrating corporate email services from the Blackberry to the iPhone started about a month ago, said the spokeswoman, although she did not know how many of the Asia-focused bank’s 75,000 employees used company-issued Blackberries or when the switch-over could be completed.

Bankers at other institutions such as HSBC Holdings Plc and Morgan Stanley have so far been restricted to the Blackberry as the standard device issued by their firms for business communications. Despite some indications of change, it may take time for a broader switch to take place, mainly because of security concerns, according to financial professionals and IT analysts.

“If more companies switch to the iPhone, this is of course bad news for RIM,” said Lu Chialin, an IT industry analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei. “However, it will take a long time for companies to do their own internal testing before deciding to change, so it will be a while before it has any effect on RIM.”

Blackberries, from Canada’s Research in Motion, are the device of choice for bankers and executives who need regular access to email and the Internet when outside the office.

RIM had the biggest share of the US smartphone market at 36%, ahead of handsets running Google’s Android operating system with 28% and Apple with 21%, according to a recent study by NPD Group.

Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. launched an initiative to offer its staff the choice of Blackberry or iPhone to access corporate email in June 2009. Now the bank picks up the cost of the data plan for its employees in Singapore, Malaysia, China and overseas branches.

“This initiative is not intended to replace the BlackBerry. Rather, we want to provide our colleagues with another option to access their office email and sync their contacts, notes and calendar while on the move,” said Peter Koh, head of technology infrastructure at OCBC.

Meanwhile, some small, privately-held financial companies, consultancy and law firms have also started allowing employees to port corporate e-mails to their personal iPhones on request, bankers and asset managers told Trading China, a Thomson Reuters online community for financial professionals.

The biggest issue for most firms choosing telephone and email hardware is data encryp-tion, said Macquarie’s Mr. Lu.

“RIM has a system that is more effective than most other handset makers, so if there is a shift towards the iPhone it’s not going to happen overnight but rather a slow and gradual change,” he said. - Reuters