Consumers worldwide want more mobile banking via smartphones

FICO has released the results of an international survey of smartphone consumers showing that they want to do much more mobile banking than most of today’s smartphone apps permit.

While the most requested functionality is the ability to check account balances (75%), more than half of respondents want to receive notifications of potential fraudulent activity (59%), make payments from their account (53%) and transfer money between their accounts (50%) using their smartphone.

The demographic breakdown showed that across all categories, young people showed the most interest in banking services delivered by smartphone.  When it came to specific product services such as receiving credit card bill payment reminders and credit card limit warnings, people aged 25 to 39 were the most interested in delivery by smartphone.

The least popular service, according to the findings, was to receive information about new products and services (39%). Interest in this dropped with age, with only 6.5% of over 55s attracted to the idea.

The survey also found that men were more interested in smartphone banking services than women – by an average of three to four percentage points across all age groups.

The survey looked at consumer preferences and tendencies with regards to mobile, online and in-person interactions with banks. It included 2,239 adult smartphone users in the UK, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Turkey and the United States.

“Over one billion consumers worldwide have smartphones in their pockets, so it stands to reason that many of them would want to conduct their banking using those devices,” said Stuart Wells, FICO’s Executive Vice President, Chief Product and Technology Officer.

“For forward-thinking banks, this presents an unprecedented opportunity to differentiate themselves and strengthen their relationships with their customers. The unique ability to combine voice, applications, text, and location information with powerful analytics, personalisation and automated communications make mobile banking much more significant than previous channel expansions, including the advent of ATMs or even online banking.”

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