Bank of America’s Mobile Logins Now Outnumber Online Logins

See update here.

Bank of America Corp.‘s customers are “now” logging in to the bank’s mobile platform in greater numbers than to its online platform.

That monumental development was disclosed yesterday by Marc Warshawsky, the bank’s senior vice president, mobile solutions executive, at the NetFinance conference, although Warshawsky offered scant details on the frame of reference for this milestone in customer behavior.

Warshawsky also said that Bank of America “allows for mobile account origination,” but again offered few specifics, such as when the bank went live with the change.

Details aside, both developments are monumental because online banking has for at least 15 years been the dominant digital banking channel, especially at BofA, which was a pioneer of online banking in the U.S. These two mobile events should begin to undermine that domination.

Bank of America is the nation’s second largest bank by assets.

Warshawsky said BofA will not stop at the mobile login milestones, but expressed the bank’s — and, in a wider sense, the industry’s — commitment to mobile like this: “If you can do it in a banking center, if you can do it in a call center, if you can do it online, you have to be able to do it on mobile.”

“We see a road to mobile wallet,” he told the audience, even if he did not specify what road that might be. He called out the trends defining mobile banking today: digital convergence, personalization, relevance, geolocation, social media, and improving the quality of communication between banks and customers.

How should banks approach mobile? “Think like a software company,” Warshawsky said. But he added a word of caution to developers: “Not everything is the right thing to do for customers just because you can do it.”