Use of mobile financial services rose sharply during the second quarter compared with the end of last year, according to comScore’s latest mobile banking adoption research.
Some 32.5 million Americans accessed banking information using mobile devices during the quarter, representing 13.9% of all mobile-phone users, the survey found. Of that total, 12.7 million mobile subscribers used mobile banking applications, up 45% from the fourth quarter of 2010.
The use of mobile devices to access credit card information also grew at a high rate, by 43% for mobile apps and 17% by mobile browser.
The popularity of smartphones drove much of the growth.
“All ships rise when the tide comes in,” notes Marc DeCastro, IDC research director for consumer banking and community banking “We’ve been predicting that smartphone growth in 2012 would exceed the feature phone. There’s been steady period-over-period growth in mobile banking.”
Besides more consumers having smartphones, banks’ awareness campaigns also have helped drive mobile banking adoption, DeCastro says.
However, that overall mobile banking adoption numbers are still low, he cautions.
“It’s easy to show growth in high percentages when there are still low numbers of people using the channel,” DeCastro says. “Mobile is still the channel of last resort,” versus branches, ATMs and online banking, he says.
Over the past three months, IDC estimates, most banks have had a 10% to 15% mobile banking penetration rate. This is strong, considering it took online banking 10 years to get to the 50% to 60% adoption ranges.
Credit cardholders used mobile devices to access banking services more frequently than fixed-line computers in the second quarter, the comScore study. Sixty-two percent of credit card customers reported using a mobile app to visit a bank’s Web site at least once a week, and 52% reported checking in with the same frequency via a mobile browser. In comparison, only 34% of users were found to be checking into their accounts with the same frequency from a fixed-line computer.
