Today’s banking customers are increasingly relying on smartphones over computers for money management.
Overall, banks are sending their customers an average of over 16 texts alerts per second.
512 Million Alerts in 2017
Last year alone, banks sent their customers around 512 million text alerts to notify people that they’ve been paid, that they were approaching overdraft, or of other important account movements. A UK Finance report outlined the way today’s banks and customers are interacting. The banking trade body examined the growing reliance on technology for budgeting.
The report arrived at a time in which TSB Bank continues its ongoing struggles to provide digital services. Since TSB’s five million customers were migrated from the Lloyds’ IT system to one managed by Sabadel following a change in the bank’s ownership last month, the problems haven’t stopped.
The TSB Saga
UK Finance head of research, Adrian Buckle, explained that the TSB debacle has created a significant level of upset. Buckle pointed out that this was a clear demonstration of exactly how much today’s consumers depend on digital banking services.
“It is up to the industry to ensure that these problems do not happen again,” said Buckle. “It is not just TSB looking at that but all banks across the whole industry.”
Increasing App Importance
The report, titled The Way We Bank Now, showed that banking apps experienced 5.5 billion logins in 2017. This represented a substantial 13 percent increase over 2016.
Millennials are using mobile banking apps more than anyone else. Nearly 59 percent of people aged 16 to 24 years and about 69 percent of people aged 25 to 34 years use their smartphones to complete banking tasks. On the other hand, 49 percent of people aged 65 years use online banking.
The Mobile Takeover
The UK Finance report was published only the day after a similar report by CACI. That report predicted that as soon as 2019, there would be more consumers relying on mobile banking than on computer-based online banking.
Mobile banking apps were originally created to let people check their balances and look in on their most recent transactions. However, consumers can now use them to complete increasingly complex transactions, including conducting money transfers between accounts or to friends, setting up standing orders, or other money management tasks.