More than 10% of U.S. consumers had set up mobile banking services in 2009 but a smaller proportion actually used the services, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
The finding in the Boston Fed's Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, released Thursday, highlights the importance banks should place on making their services easy to use, said Scott Moeller, the chief executive of MShift Inc., a Fremont, Calif., mobile banking vendor.
"There's a lot of people that will try something just because it's neat technology," Moeller said. "I think the interface for mobile banking needs to be as simple as possible. You don't want to have to go through a massive registration or massive sign-up" process.
Adoption rates have grown, Moeller said, noting the data is based on responses from 2009.
"You're really looking at early adopter stats," Moeller said.
The survey included more than 2,100 consumers and was conducted primarily in fall 2009. The study, which focused on how consumers use debit, credit and prepaid cards as well as cash and checks for payments, found that 10.1% of consumers had set up mobile banking by downloading an application, signing up for text message alerts from their bank or logging onto a bank's website using a mobile web browser. The survey found that 8.9% of consumers actually used mobile banking services.
By comparison, 65.7% of consumers had online banking in 2009. About 49% of consumers had set up online banking bill payment.
"The process of logging onto online banking via a cell phone is often more difficult than it is on a computer," the report said.
Moeller said over time mobile phones are likely to become a preferred tool to access banking services for consumers as financial institutions add more features to their applications, including check deposit and bill-payment functions.
"We used to figure the adoption goals in terms of a percentage of [banks'] online banking users but moving forward I really see we're going to have to change that metric," Moeller said. "I foresee that mobile banking will quickly become the primary self-service channel."
"You don't want to go back to your laptop in order to do your banking," Moeller added.
MShift has about 200 bank and credit union clients using its mobile banking software, Moeller said.
Only a handful of banks offer mobile check deposit services but vendors say they have dozens of clients who have signed agreements to offer the service and are going through the installation process.
Mitek Systems Inc., which licenses the imaging technology that most banks and software vendors use in their mobile check services, said last week that it and its partners had signed 26 new agreements with financial institutions and other customers for the technology.
