Study: Most People Just Don’t Care About Mobile Banking

Many people in the banking industry are very excited about mobile banking. At conferences, in reports and in news articles for industry insiders, there is near monolithic agreement that within a few years everybody will be banking using their smartphones.

There’s just one small group that isn’t convinced: The overwhelming majority of consumers.

Lightspeed Research recently asked 10,000 people whether they believed having the ability to manage their finances on their mobile phones was important. About 80 percent of them said no.

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Only about four percent said that mobile banking was “very important to them,” and about ten percent said it was “somewhat important.” (The numbers vary a bit by credit card issuer.)

Meanwhile the plurality of people, approaching 50 percent of most bank customers, just don’t care. They find mobile banking “Very unimportant,” the report found.

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This less-than-rosy outlook for smartphone banking was backed up recently by Rahu Gupta, president of Fiserv Inc., a data company for the financial services industry. People aren’t picking up on mobile banking because they still don’t trust that it’s safe, Gupta said at a symposium organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

That could cause problems for banks, which are counting on mobile and online banking to reduce their costs.

“We see a big trust issue, and that is leading to adoption barriers,” Gupta said, according to American Banker. “If the consumer takes a pass on mobile, we’re all in trouble financially.”

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Image: Johan Larsson, via Flickr.com