Growth
05/01/2015

Does Mobile Matter?


5-1-15-Naomi.pngThere are five services via the smartphone that the top five banks in the country all offer: mobile banking, mobile bill pay, mobile check deposit, person-to-person payments, and ATM/branch locator. Does your bank have all five?

The question was posed at Bank Director’s Bank Board Growth and Innovation Conference in New Orleans on Wednesday. With more than 150 bank directors and officers in the room, only a handful raised their hands.

The speaker, Dave DeFazio, a partner at StrategyCorps, which provides deposit account and mobile phone products to banks, said all of these services are necessary. The nation’s population is increasingly in love with smartphones. If people lose their phone, they feel out of sorts, disconnected. It’s the first thing many people touch in the morning when they wake up. They use their smartphones when they’re driving (not a good idea). They check Facebook at work.

The end result is that banks that don’t provide easy-to-use, indispensable mobile apps will increasingly find themselves losing the battle for market share in the years ahead, DeFazio said.

Mobile service vendors are not the only ones who think mobile matters. There are now more mobile phones than landline phones in the United States.  Sixty percent of smartphone or tablet owners who switched financial institutions said mobile played an important or very important role in their decision to switch, according to a survey by the consulting firm AlixPartners.

It’s important not to confuse mobile services with online services for a laptop or desktop. Young people use their phones, and less frequently, their laptops. Your customers shouldn’t have to sign up for mobile banking services using an online portal for a laptop or desktop, he said.

“I have young people in my house who barely touch their laptops anymore,’’ DeFazio said. “Make it your mission to have an app people can’t live without.”

Millennials, the generation that tends to be in their late teens through early 30s, are distrustful of the biggest banks, but a greater percentage of them switch to big banks than older generations, according to the survey by AlixPartners. The reason? Millennials want digital services that are convenient and easy-to-use, and small banks don’t provide the same level of mobile services that big banks do, in general. Millennials aren’t as interested in going into a branch and speaking to a banker face to face as older generations are.

Not everyone in the crowd at the Bank Board Growth and Innovation Conference was impressed. One attendee questioned whether his bank should want to attract millennials. He pointed out that most of the more successful banks profiled at the conference focus on commercial customers. DeFazio answered that whatever its audience, a bank should pay attention to its mobile offerings.

“There are as many digital baby boomers as digital millennials,’’ he said. There are other reasons as well. Those most interested in using mobile services from their banks are the young and those with higher incomes. People who use mobile banking services tend to get a higher number of banking products from their bank than the average customer, according to AlixPartners.

Smaller banks may not have as many offerings as large banks, but some of them have leaders who don’t want their banks to fall behind. Brian Unruh, president and CEO of $600 million asset National Bank of Kansas City, in Overland Park, Kansas, says it’s almost overwhelming how many different technology companies are out there offering services to banks. But his bank is committed to offering mobile banking services. It recently switched Internet banking providers, and went with Austin, Texas-based Q2 Software, a smaller and more nimble company, he said. His bank recently hired a software developer and may hire a second, to develop mobile apps in-house.

Mobile services are definitely necessary, he said. “You have to get it to attract new customers,’’ he said.

WRITTEN BY

Naomi Snyder

Editor-in-Chief

Editor-in-Chief Naomi Snyder is in charge of the editorial coverage at Bank Director. She oversees the magazine and the editorial team’s efforts on the Bank Director website, newsletter and special projects. She has more than two decades of experience in business journalism and spent 15 years as a newspaper reporter. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.