)
)
)
)
The mobile channel is everywhere — including Christmas cards! Check out how mobile devices infiltrated one family’s Christmas card photo:
Happy Holidays from the Clairmail family to yours!
Monthly Archive for December, 2011
Based on its October 2011 “Mobile Apps Consumer Survey”, ClickFox developed an infographic to illustrate the effectiveness of mobile applications for customer engagement.
Some interesting stats from the survey include:
- Nearly half (48%) of those surveyed use mobile apps more than 10 times a day.
- On average, smartphone owners use mobile apps 667 minutes every month.
- Nearly ¾ (73%) have used a mobile app to make a purchase or assist with a buying decision.
- iPhone owners (81%) are the most active and influenced, followed by Android (72%) and BlackBerry (63%).
- Mobile banking apps are the most frequently used type of mobile application.
The payments world is in a state of evolution – from cash to check to credit to cardless. Intuit developed an infographic which effectively illustrates how mobile payments are growing and where they’re going in the future.
Today, the two biggest payment methods are credit and debit cards – with a small, but rising mobile payments currently making up a mere 5 percent of purchases executed.
According to Aite Group, though, U.S. consumers’ use of cash will decline by a total of 17 percent, or 4 percent every year, between 2010 and 2015. Cash is expected to drop to just over $1 trillion changing hands in 2015.
Meanwhile, alternate (mobile, online and contactless) payments are projected to surge considerably to $2.7 trillion, hugely surpassing cash as a trusted method of payment.
A key driver for the jump in alternate payments is the proliferation of smartphones. Smartphones have permeated over 40 percent of mobile users, AND 37 percent of small business owners –creatinga level playing field for people wanting to buy and sell over the phone.
A KPMG study shows that 83 percent of people believe mobile payments will be mainstream globally within the next four years, and other analysts agree. Juniper Research projects 2.5 billion mobile phone users will make mobile payments in 2015, and Yankee Group forecasts global mobile transactions will exceed $1 trillion by that year.
About half (49%) of Canadians are expected to use mobile banking in the next two years, according to a recent study by ING Direct. The number grows to 64% when looking at 18 to 34-year olds.
35% of those surveyed reported conducting mobile banking on their handsets in the last 12 months. Of those, 66% used a dedicated app — all five major Canadian banks have mobile apps for at least one platform — while 34% used the bank’s mobile website.
In terms of what they actually used it for, 63% checked balances, 19% paid bills and 15% transferred funds.
Asked for a wish list of mobile banking features, 31% wanted the ability to make mobile payments, 27% desired the ability to add a payee, and 19% requested personal finance management/budgeting tools.
Security is still the biggest barrier to customer adoption, with 64% claiming it as their number one concern, but a greater number, 27%, are no longer worried about security breaches.
These findings are consistent with a Forrester Research study previously discussed in the MobileFI blog, which showed that mobile banking adoption in Canada jumped by 8% over the past two years.
Bank Technology News recently highlighted Clairmail customer BECU. Below is an excerpt.
Howie Wu, vice president of virtual banking for BECU (formerly Boeing Employee Credit Union), says the next step for the credit union as it expands its digital banking reach is to move more functions such as “actionable alerts” to the mobile channel.
The credit union, which just finished an upgrade of its iPhone app, is scheduled to finish a similar upgrade to its native Android app by March. Both upgrades followed the credit union’s move to Clairmail from Firethorn after Firethorn discontinued its mobile banking service. “This year, we spent some time redoing what we had already done,” Wu says.
As it looks forward, BECU hopes to take advantage of alerts, an important tool for financial institutions, but one that is often misused. By linking alerts to transaction options, BECU hopes to use alerts as a relationship builder, an effort also underway by banks such as Bank of Montreal.
“You don’t want to just send consumers a message about their account and not do anything else. It doesn’t do the user any good,” Wu says.
Wu says the credit union is working with Clairmail to develop a series of options, such as account transfers to cover overdrafts or mobile remote deposit capture, that can be directly linked from account alerts. “We want to say to customers that we have these features that help you respond to your immediate situation, and give consumers the choice of whether to use the services to respond while on their mobile device. That’s more sticky,” Wu says.
Analyst firm, comScore, recently released data from its comScore MobiLens report, which highlighted key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending in October 2011.
Some interesting data from comScore included the following:
90 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during this three month period, which is up 10 percent from the preceding three month period.- During this time period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices.
- Google Android continued to dominate the smartphone market (with 46.3 percent market share, up 4.4 percentage points from the prior three-month period).
- Apple’s OEM share also gained during this period (perhaps with the introduction of the iPhone 4S and Sprint as a carrier in the market), with one in ten mobile subscribers now using an iPhone.
- 71.8 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.8 percentage points, and the top-ranked activity for mobile content usage.
comScore’s data, particularly the statistics about text messaging, are consistent with a recent MobileFI blog entry, which showed that texting is the number one most used data service in the world.
