AUSTIN, Texas Mobile Picture Pay, a new service that lets end-users take pictures of bills to make payments, showed “impressive” results in April, according to a new study from Malauzai Software, Inc.
Malauzai, a provider of mobile banking SmartApps for community financial institutions, released data from its Monkey Insights service, reporting key trends in mobile banking application usage for April 2013. The study is based on April data for more than 94 banks and credit unions encompassing 1,100,000 logins for 85,000 registered mobile banking users.
For those banks and credit unions that have launched Mobile Picture Pay, 5% of their active end-users have used the feature in the first 90 days of launch. That is above the usage figure of 3.5% for standard bill pay on the mobile device.
The company offered additional data points for Mobile Picture Pay:
End-users are making 1.57 Picture Pay payments per month
The average payment size for Picture Pay is $151, about 40% less than standard bill pay
End-users are gaining confidence and average payment size is increasing by more than 50% month-to month
iOS end-users average payment size is 25% higher than their Android counterparts
iOS end-users are making payments at a 25% higher rate than Android users
12% of payments are “pay-again” meaning the end-user does not take a new picture but pays an existing biller
iPad end-users are outperforming iOS and Android end-users with all metrics increased by more than 50%
Revenue is being generated, as well, Malauzai reported. Expedited Picture Pay payments account for approximately 3% of overall payments and the number is growing. The company said this creates a revenue opportunity for a bank or credit union to charge a convenience fee when the payment is made immediately, usually within one to two days. Expedited payment fees vary by institution.
Picture Pay’s image acceptance rate is improving and already is working better than Mobile Check Capture. Malauzai said 67% of pictures are processed successfully for Picture Pay, compared to 52% processed successfully for Mobile Check Capture. While bills would seem to be a harder image to successfully capture and read, the company said in fact checks represent a more difficult challenge given that failure rates are higher due to common issues such as not signing the back of the check.
