It’s easy to see why they are excited about mobile. There are over 6.2 billion mobiles– as Candido Leonelli, managing director at Brazil-based Banco Bradesco, said at the Summit, there are more mobiles than toothbrushes in the world. The M-Pesa example shows the appetite for mobile banking - out of a population of 41 million in Kenya, there are 17 million M-Pesa accounts. Leonelli is seeing strong numbers at Bradesco as well. Payments made by mobile have increased by almost four times in the past year.
It is not just emerging market banks that are jumping on the mobile bandwagon. According to Todd Maclin, co-chief executive officer of Chase Consumer and Community Banking at JPMorgan Chase, in the US, mobile deposits now make up 5% of all deposits and are growing by 131% annually. And Ashok Vaswani, chief executive of UK retail and business banking at Barclays Bank, said that there are now about a million registered users of Pingit, Barclays’s mobile payment app, in the UK.
Mobile banking has the power to be truly transformative because it is more than just payments and deposits. At Chase, customers can use their mobiles to interact with ATMs and at Bradesco, mobiles are even used to help visually impaired customers.
Use of mobile banking will only increase as the generations who have grown up with mobile phones open bank accounts. Maclin believes that 70% of Generation Y in the US will be mobile banking “first” (meaning mobile will be their first port of call) by 2015.
But mobile is just one piece of the puzzle. Kumar Ramachandran, business development and re-engineering head of EMEA Consumer at Citi, said that his customers expect an integrated, on-the-go experience that is consistent across channels – mobile, tablet, PC, ATM and branch.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
