financial services

Mobile Banking Growth Opportunity 'Substantial'

Smartphone

Smartphones and tablets have already upended the consumer electronics industry (having reached near-equal penetration to e-readers and netbooks, according to Parks Associates). And they're expected to have a residual effect on the mobile banking world as well.

According to a study from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies, more than half of smartphone and tablet owners use their devices for some form of mobile banking. At the same time, the 39% of people who plan to purchase one of the devices will use it for banking.

Those statistics show that growth for mobile banking will come from new owners, rather than the current owners, who have already made up their minds whether they'll engage in mobile banking. According to the survey, only 6% of smartphone or tablet owners said they planned to enroll in mobile banking in the next six months.

"The growth opportunity is substantial," Jim Garrity, vice president of Chadwick Martin Bailey's financial services practice, tells Marketing Daily. "The majority of the growth is coming from people who don't have the smartphone in hand. Of the people who have a smartphone today, the vast majority of them have made that decision."

CMB's study also found consumers are becoming more comfortable using their smartphones to make purchases. According to the survey, 45% of smartphone owners made a purchase with their device over the past year. The majority of those payments are tied to credit cards (49%), while 40% of those purchases were tied to debit cards and PayPal.

Despite the many publicized security breaches among financial institutions (and other companies), consumers seem to believe the convenience of having access to their account information and ability to transfer funds from anywhere outweighs any security concerns they may have, Garrity says.

"Most of the security breaches have been on the large-scale, institutional side of the business," Garrity says. "Unless we start hearing any well-publicized stories of people who've had their [personal] accounts compromised because of mobile banking, it will continue to grow."

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