Ah, the hype. When you read headlines like, “The Revolution Will Be Mobile,” you can’t help but see stars — on your iPhone.
Yet, the fact is, online banking still garners hefty interest from consumers. Below is a graphic from Google Trends that compares search traffic over the last several years for the terms “online banking” and “mobile banking.” “Online banking” is the red line. That other, blue line that you can barely see — that’s the indexed search traffic for “mobile banking.”
To be sure, search traffic for mobile banking is climbing, and it should be noticed that these are indexed traffic figures in comparison to one another with the number 100 representing the peak search interest for either term. But, still. Anyone thinking of dramatically trimming the budget for online banking needs an intervention.
Sorry, but I think this article’s title is misleading. A user searching for the words “mobile banking” is hardly an indicator of mobile adoption. If you want some real indicators, check out this Federal Reserve report: http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/consumers-and-mobile-financial-services-report-201303.pdf The reality is much different than what you are suggesting.
First, thank you for your comment. I very much appreciate it.
Although I recognized the limitations of the data — this measures online search, not mobile search, for example — I think the numbers are still startling. I expected the results to be the exact opposite. I mean, who is running an “online banking” search today? Who needs more information about “online banking,” compared to “mobile banking? But clearly there are still more people — a lot more people — who want information on “online banking” vs “mobile banking.” This is only more surprising considering the Fed’s report.
JJ doesn’t your graph require that mobile banking and online banking to be distinct things? Especially in the world of smart phones why would I search for mobile banking? I have a browser, I have an app store (where I am more likely to search for something uniquely mobile). I think you are right to point out that PC based web access still trumps mobile access. But I am not sure your data set is actually a proof point for you argument. Moreover, when you start to break down which customers, how profitable, etc it might not even matter.
Search stats and Google Trends are an interesting measure of popularity (and the results shown here indeed slightly intriguing), but even if you don’t trust them, reports (well, actually the hype) about the cannibalisation of other forms of online banking by mobile are greatly exaggerated.
Opposing online vs. mobile feels like the wrong debate, both are complementary and most likely feeding their respective usage. More thoughts about this here: http://blog.moneythor.com/2013/04/23/mobile-vs-desktop-based-online-banking/
The biggest problem with this data is that consumers view mobile banking as online banking, it’s the same thing. You access your online banking from your mobile device. I would also imagine that the Google has no access to Appstore search data either. What would be far more interesting is the percentage of this search data from mobile devices.