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At this year's Mobile Banking and Commerce Summit in Miami, many attendees recognized that mobile banking has moved from the abstract to reality but worried about how to make money on their tech investments and how to keep transactions secure.
June 6 -
With consumers cherry-picking mobile banking apps, the industry is facing a dramatic transformation in how it develops and popularizes products, say execs from Wells Fargo, USAA and Citi.
June 4 -
American Banker debuts a monthly gauge of U.S. mobile banking activity among banks and their customers.
May 28 -
Consumers continue to move to mobile banking although security concerns may keep some bank customers from reaching for their devices.
April 2
The shift by Americans to mobile devices has reached a milestone.
Fifty-six percent of U.S. adults own a smartphone of some type up from 35% of adults two years ago, the Pew Research Center said in a
The report marks the first time in the two years that Pew has surveyed smartphone adoption that a majority of Americans say their mobile phone is a smartphone or that their phone operates on the iPhone, Android, Windows or BlackBerry platform.
The adoption comes amid a surge of shopping, surfing, social media and other activity on mobile phones in recent years. Twenty-eight percent of all mobile phone owners banked with their device in the past 12 months, up from 21% a year earlier, according to a
Mobile banking had a
Eighty-one percent of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 own a smartphone, although ownership also tends to be highest among people ages 18 to 24 (79%), 35 to 44 (69%) and 45 to 54 (55%), according to the Pew report.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans in households that have at least $75,000 in income annually own a smartphone, while 61% of smartphone owners earn at least $50,000 a year and 52% of owners earn at least $30,000 a year, Pew found.
"Younger adults regardless of income are very likely to be smartphone owners," Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at Pew, writes in the report. "Conversely, for older adults, smartphone ownership is more of an elite phenomenon: smartphones tend to be quite prevalent at the upper end of the income distribution but much less common among those with lower income levels."
As for platforms, 28% of all cellphone owners use an Android device, an increase of 13 percentage points in two years, while iPhone owners represent 25% of smartphone-owning Americans, up from 10% in May 2011. The share of Americans who say they own a BlackBerry device has fallen six percentage points, to 4%, over the same period.
Platform choices vary by income and demographic group, according to Pew. Nearly half (49%) of cellphone owners in households that earn at least $150,000 a year say their phone is an iPhone, while smartphones that run Android grab a bigger share of the market than iPhone among owners with a household income of less than $75,000 annually.
African-American cellphone owners (42%) are more likely than whites (26%) or Latinos (27%) to say they own an Android device compared with an iPhone, Pew found.
