Similar to what’s happening in America at the moment, mobile banking in the UK being described as a “consumer-led revolution” and that’s not a surprise given that customers are using them 7,610 times every minute – four billion times a year, according to a new report by the British Bankers’ Association.
The third annual The Way We Bank Now report, supported by EY, shows that the number of people using digital banking is rising, and fast.
Mobile apps up, internet login down
Payments using mobile apps in 2015 were 347 million, up 54% or 122 million from the year before. It won’t be long before mobile app payments overtake payments being made using internet banking, which hit 417 million last year, only a 2% increase from 2014. With more than 13.8 million apps being downloaded in 2015 – a 25 per cent rise on 2014, it could even be as early as next year.
In fact, the number of internet banking logins dropped last year 4.3 million a day in 2015 compared with 4.4 million in 2014.
Contactless cards growing
The report also reinforced the dominance of contactless cards, with their usage surging by 250% and spending topping £1.1 billion a month in March. They entered the £1 billion-a-month-club back in January 2016. Banks issued 15 million cards with contactless technology in 2015, up 54 per cent on the year before.
Anthony Browne, BBA CEO said:
We are in the midst of a consumer-led revolution in the way we do our day-to-day banking. Customers love the new technology that is allowing us to bank round the clock.
You can set up standing orders while standing in the queue for the bus and check your balance while checking in at the airport. The choice now on offer from banks, from state-of-the-art branches to cutting edge apps, has put customers firmly in the driving seat on the way we bank.
Physical bank branch visits down
The report also references new CACI that highlights a drop in visits to bank branches, from 476 million in 2011 to 278 million in 2016, and it expects this trend to continue for the next five years.
Other figures show average visits per branch a day have fallen from 104 in 2011, to 71 in 2016 and 51 in 2021. The average visits to a branch per customer per year has also declined from 13.7 in 2011 to 8.1 in 2016, and is forecast to drop to 5.3 in 2021.
However, these potential interactions aren’t just disappearing into thin air since the number of customer interactions with their bank overall has increased since 2011. That’s because it includes phone, internet, mobile app interactions. This trend is expected to continue all the way up to 2021, from 2.3 times a month to 6.3 times respectively.
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