Digital Usage Blows Up at BofA, Wells

You might as well call them e-Bank of America and Wells Fargo Digital Bank.

Both BofA and Wells, the No. 2 and No. 3 ranked banks in the U.S., respectively, today for the first time released usage numbers for their digital banking operations, and they are eyepopping.

BofA got 112 million weekly digital interactions last quarter, up 11% year-over-year, on 33.8 million active online banking accounts and 21.6 million active mobile users. That compares to 13 million uses per week for ATMs, 10 million for phone and 5 million for its branches. Combined, ATM, phone and branch usage fell 8% YOY.

At Wells, the usage numbers are equally massive (although Wells offered less detail on usage in its earnings today). Wells announced that “total digital secure sessions,” which include online and mobile, reached 479.2 million in December 2016, up 4% from the same month in 2016, on 27.3 active digital customers, which includes both online and mobile. That’s 8.7x the amount of usage Wells’s branch network got during the month. Wells’s mobile users reached 19.6 million for the quarter.

If we convert Wells’s digital usage into an average weekly amount, it likely generates around 120 million interactions per week, as compared to BofA’s 112 million.

(JPMorgan Chase & Co., which also released its quarterly earnings today, did not provide data on digital channel usage.)

These numbers have profound implications. BofA also disclosed today that 20% of its total sales are “digital sales.” Even if that’s an amorphous definition, just the fact that the usage numbers have made it to BofA’s and Wells’s quarterly earnings presentation is a sign that digital has become a core factor and function at the nation’s major financial institutions. Not that that should surprise any reader of this blog, but it is meaningful to see the numbers, which are the result of less than 10 years of technological evolution.