Despite the buzz surrounding mobile-banking services, a relatively few consumers use them on a regular basis, though nearly half are familiar with them, new research suggests.
The study data from First Data Corp. and Market Strategies International also suggest that nearly half of consumers younger than 35 are interested in emerging mobile-payment technologies. And this underscores the dramatic split between older and younger consumers when it comes to adopting new banking technologies, Mark Willard, senior vice president and head of Market Strategies’ financial services division, tells PaymentsSource.
In the online survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 and older conducted March 17 to 24, 15% of respondents said they use mobile-banking services regularly to manage their accounts online through smartphones, while 47% of respondents said they were familiar with the services but did not use them. The remaining 38% said they were unfamiliar with mobile-banking services.
Two-thirds of all respondents said they were familiar with account alerts, such as e-mails and text messages notifying customers of account activity and payment-due dates, but only 37% of them were using them, according to the study. Some 10% of those surveyed said they had signed up to receive text alerts notifying about bank-account activity.
Younger consumers, especially those younger than 35, showed the greatest curiosity about new banking technologies, including mobile-wallet technology that would enable consumers to store information for purchases through credit and debit accounts in their smartphones for easier access and management, Willard says.
Asked to describe their interest in mobile-wallet technology, 18% of all respondents said it sounded appealing, while 48% of respondents younger than 35 said they were interested in it.
Forty percent of the respondents who said mobile-wallet technology sounded appealing said they would be more interested in it if it increased their overall convenience and could deliver point-of-sale discounts and rewards.
Asked what type of company they would trust the most to provide them with mobile-wallet security, 59% of respondents reported that they were very inclined to trust, or would definitely trust, their own bank, followed by PayPal Inc. at 47%, credit card issuers at 32%, Google Inc. at 23%, their mobile-phone carrier at 22%, Apple Inc.’s iTunes at 12% and Facebook Inc. at 8%.
That consumers are most inclined to trust their financial institutions with providing emerging banking technologies, such as mobile wallets, should be of great interest to U.S. banks, Willard says.
“Consumers are saying that right now banks have permission to be leaders in (the mobile-wallet) space,” he says. “While there are many new players that want to enter that arena, banks have an opportunity to capitalize on the trust consumers have placed in them and market their products accordingly.”
Not surprisingly, the study also found that younger, more technologically advanced respondents were most ready to adopt new mobile-banking and mobile-payment technologies, while a large chunk of the population, including older participants, remained uninterested, Willard says.
“The study’s results point to the fact that about a fourth of the population is leaning toward adopting these new technologies, a fourth feel technology is moving too fast for them, and about half are somewhere in the middle,” he says. “The bottom line is that it remains an advantage to aim product marketing for new technologies toward younger people and early adopters, assuming that others will eventually follow their lead.”
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