News

Report benchmarks mobile banking trends

December 8, 2016

FI Navigator and Celent have released "Mobile Banking Quantified: Comprehensive Benchmarks for US Vendors & Institutions," an analysis of mobile banking trends for nearly 7,000 U.S. financial institutions and 48 retail mobile banking technology providers.

The report combines the FI Navigator model for mobile banking data and analytics with Celent industry research methodologies to gain insight into mobile offerings and performance across the U.S., according to a press release,

Areas of focus include market share, customer adoption, use and satisfaction, mobile feature provision and more.

Highlights from report:

• 57.1 percent of U.S. banks and credit unions offer a mobile banking app (this rises to 85.7 percent when FIs with less than $100 million in assets are excluded);
• the ratio of mobile banking users to total deposit accounts is 27.6 percent;
• FIs with more than $500 million in assets which offer mobile deposit saw 115 percent higher mobile banking enrollment than those who did not offer the feature; and
• between September 2015 and September 2016, 1,552 banks and credit unions added quick balance to their mobile banking apps, making it the most widely adopted feature during that time.

"U.S. Mobile banking adoption is lower than one might expect based on the headlines," said Daniel Latimore, senior vice president of the Celent banking practice. "Only 57 percent of all institutions have an app; this is driven primarily by poor adoption among smaller institutions with less than $100 million in assets. The vendor market can be divided into two large groups: multiproduct solutions providers; and pure plays. In either case, the key to mobile success is adoption by end consumers; vendors are typically paid based on some variant of installed users."

"Arguably, nearly every financial institution's strategic plan has prioritized their digital transformation of retail banking," said Steve Cotton, CEO and founder of FI Navigator. "They clearly recognize its importance, but have lacked the data to assess their own performance. Now those institutions and their vendor partners have the ability to compare their performance and offering to peers."