Mobile Banking 2010: The Always-Open – Everywhere Bank.

Check your bank balance? Pay your electric bill? Lend a friend some cash? There are apps for that. But actually, an app isn’t even necessary. A text message may be all it takes. As the mobile phone becomes more and more the digital communication hub of modern life, on-the-go banking is becoming more and more the norm.

Mobile 2010: A Leap Year for on-the-go Computing

The hype has been building for years. Since the iPhone and Apple’s App Store reached phenom status, since Android’s break into the mainstream with the Droid and Verizon, and now with AT&T’s adoption of more Android and Palm devices — not to mention RIM’s dogged efforts to keep the Blackberry relevant — the age of mobile computing may finally be fully upon us.

Major research firms and future-watchers are nearly unanimous in their anticipation of a tidal shift toward mobile computing. In one of the most talked about and widely quoted reports, renowned Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker — whose prediction of the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s was spot-on — predicts that, in just five years, more people will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than by personal computers.i

In the U.S., non-phone uses of mobile devices continue their steady climb. In the fourth quarter of 2009, nearly two-thirds of mobile subscribers sent text messages, 27.5 percent used a mobile browser, and nearly one-fifth used a downloaded app, according to comScore.ii In all areas, usage increased from the third to the fourth quarter for America’s 234 million mobile subscribers.

Taking Mobile to the Bank

Brick-and-mortar banks may still adhere to banker’s hours — though in many cases those hours extend later in the day and into the weekend — but consumers have clearly demonstrated their desire to bank at their convenience, not the banker’s. More than 75 percent of surveyed consumers use online banking, according to a 2008 Forrester survey, and more than a quarter were increasing their usage.iii Consumers have embraced electronic banking, and now they are increasingly doing their electronic banking on the fly.

Mobile banking is still a relatively small subset of the banking universe. The Forrester study indicates 14 percent of consumers use mobile banking,iv and a more recent TowerGroup study estimates 10 million active users in 2009. That same study, however, predicts annual growth of more than 50 percent, with over 53 million active users by 2013.v The most recent survey by the Mobile Marketing Association and Luth Research finds 17 percent of U.S. adults using mobile banking, and projects usage to grow to 22 percent in the next 12 months; more than half of U.S. consumers are interested in accessing banking services through their mobile devices.vi

To download report CLICK on link below:
http://www.keynote.com/benchmark/downloads/Mobile_Banking_industry_focus.pdf>