Inside the Mobile Banking Surge, Some Disappointing Data
The mobile banking channel is exploding. In a good way.
Yesterday we mentioned FIS’s announcement of 150% growth in its mobile clients. Today we came across noteworthy numbers from Andera, a provider of online account-opening software, that indicated a 70.3% increase in total online users over the past two years, and within that population, a 269% jump in mobile users.
Andera reports that smartphone use among customers of its 15 largest clients has grown dramatically over the past two years. By the end of the first six months of 2010, smartphones contributed 2.59% of total online traffic. During that timeframe in 2011, the number grew to 4.15%, and by this year smartphone traffic increased to 9.55% of total traffic.
But Tim Matthews, Director of Product Marketing at Symantec, cites the Federal Reserve’s statistic that 21% of smartphone owners use their phones for banking and wonders why this number isn’t higher. He concludes that fear – and misguided fear at that – is keeping the numbers low.
Mobile apps, he writes, provide a direct connection to banks, unmediated by browsers or third-party applications. Geolocation and push messages indicating account activity also keep smartphone users more securely connected with their banks. Smartphone technology provides a more direct relationship between banks and customers than is possible via a desktop computer, and is more convenient since smartphones can be with you wherever you are (except in the swimming pool). Indeed, creditscore.net reports—in a charming infographic—that 9 out of 10 Americans have their cellphone within arm’s reach 24 hours a day.
The convenience of smartphone banking is, for now, overwhelmingly exploited by the young. Those age 60 and over own 24% of the smartphones out there, but make up only 6% of mobile customers, while 18-29 year-olds own 22% of smartphones, but account for a whopping 44% of mobile banking customers.
Another cause for concern is the slow adoption of mobile payment services, such as Google Wallet. Wired reports that the eagerness of customers to ditch their wallets and pay with their phones is not matched on the part of merchants, which are reluctant to install NFC (Near Field Communication) technology – something we have written about previously. The Forrester Group estimates that only 25% of US consumers will own an NFC-enabled device by 2016. And they’ll still have to wait, since this infrastructure may not fully be in place for another six years after that, says Gartner Group analyst Mark Hung. So it seems we can’t get rid of our wallets just yet.
