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 April 7, highlights the importance banks should place on making their services easy to use, says Scott Moeller, the chief executive of MShift Inc., a Fremont, Calif.-based mobile-banking vendor.
“There’s a lot of people that will try something just because it’s neat technology,” Moeller says. “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 since the Fed study, Moeller says, noting the data are based on survey responses from fall 2009.
“You’re really looking at early-adopter stats,” Moeller says.
The survey included more than 2,100 consumers.
The study, which primarily 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 on to 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 respondents had online banking in 2009, and about 49% had set up online banking bill-payment.
“The process of logging on to online banking via a cell phone is often more difficult than it is on a computer,” the Fed said in its report.
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, Moeller says.
“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 says. “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 adds.
About 200 bank and credit-union clients use Mshift’s mobile-banking software, Moeller says.
Only a few banks offered 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 (
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