News

British consumers nearly double their mobile banking transactions

April 1, 2014

British consumers last year moved away from conducting bank transactions at branches and nearly doubled their use of mobile banking channels, according to a new study from the British Banking Association.

Bank customers in Great Britain are now making more than 5.7 million transactions a day using smartphones and other Internet-enabled technology, the association said in a statement about the study.

The findings come from the association's the Way We Bank Now study, a series of publications highlighting how Britain is embracing a range of easy-to-use technology that connects banks to their customers more closely than ever before.

The initial report shows that customers of the five biggest retail banks downloaded more than 12.4 million bank apps, used their mobile phones for 18.6 million transactions a week in 2013 (up from 9.1 million in 2012) and made nearly 40 million mobile and Internet transactions a week in 2013, according to the statement.

In addition, some 28.4 million debit and credit cards are fitted with contactless technology and consumers signed up to receive more than 457.7 million SMS balance alerts and other text messages during 2013.

"A revolution is underway in how people spend, move and manage their money," Anthony Browne, chief executive of the BBA, said in a statement. "This is not just about the phenomenal growth of mobile banking, which has already allowed millions of British customers to make billions of transactions from the palm of their hand."