Intermittent Signal: Brits Lag on Mobile Banking

Last week, Antenna rode into town. London town, to be precise. Antenna CEO Jim Hemmer, its CMO Jim Somers, and I, met to talk about mobile banking (I make this sound like a big deal; they came over from New Jersey, and I had to come all the way from Guildford, Jewel of the South.) And we came armed – with a pedigree (our already-delivered mobile solutions for ING Direct, RBS, Garanti, among others) – and with fresh consumer research from YouGov, which polled over 2,000 adults in the UK on their mobile banking habits on our behalf. Jim Somers details the U.S. findings in his post.

While in town, we met journalists (follow this link to read about what happened when Reuters met with Jim Hemmer), and analysts, as well as senior executives from almost all of the major UK banks at a round-table event, which we and IDC organized at Pewterer’s Hall, the home of the Worshipful Company of Pewterers. Such halls are scattered around the city of London. (Basically, if you were manufacturing or trading in fifteenth-century England, you got a fancy organizational title and your own hall.)

Here are the results of the consumer research:

*In the UK, one in four of you with mobile Internet access is carrying out some kind of banking task on a phone. And it’s the young who are leading the charge towards widespread adoption of mobile banking services – 30 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds, and 33 percent of 25 to 34-year-olds are managing their money on the go already.

*The banking tasks most of you perform on your phones, or would like your phones to perform, include checking your balance (46 percent), viewing your transaction history (31 Percent), transferring money between your accounts (27 percent), and finding ATMs (21 percent).

*And your biggest worry? Security. Sixty-nine percent of you are reluctant to use mobile banking services because you’re worried they’re not secure enough. But you’re not the only ones who are worried about securing the mobile channel for banking purposes – the banks are worried too. And we know this because they told us so in the Pewterer’s Hall.

Of course, these worries are only intensified at times like this, when paranoia is stoked twice daily by the headlines about hacking stunts that hit Paypal’s Twitter feed and Apple. No bank wants to be featured in those headlines, which may be one of the reasons why only one out of the 14 UK banks we surveyed (in-house) offers a mobile app and a mobile Web site, and only four out of 14 offer dedicated apps (iPhone only).

That may be the reason, but is it a good reason? The answer, I would argue, is no. We have always relied on banks to lead the way when it comes to safeguarding our money. That’s why we prefer to use them as opposed to hiding our savings under our mattresses. Banks should be embracing the mobile channel for banking, because their customers – especially their future high-value customers – expect them to do so. And here’s the kicker – they’ve already got the trust of consumers. Our poll found that only around 1 percent of those polled in the UK were happy to use an app not provided by their own bank.

No doubt that mobile banking is coming – security concerns or no security concerns. But banks need to start now, rather than wait for competitors to make their moves. Why? Because they’ll gain a powerful differentiator for their brands in the short term, and mobile trust with their customers, as well as crucial experience in deploying through the channel, in the long term. In my view, that’s a pretty decent payoff.

Tags: Antenna Software, Intermittent Signal, Mark Watson, mobile banking, survey