Mobile Banking Still Exists!

Okay, okay, so the headline is more than obvious, but I wanted to make sure that I show the proper amount of love to the mobile banking side since they have been slightly neglected recently (hey it's hard to compete when you're not announcing new services and new partnerships every day!). Forrester recently came up with a concrete ROI of 15.7% for mobile banking, estimating that a hypothetical bank of 500K customers, based on the ability to reduce costs, retain customers and cross-sell. In a survey, 43% of users said they made fewer calls into the service center due to mobile banking, while 30% of mobile banking users said that mbanking has made them more likely to stay with their bank.

• Wells Fargo announced that they are going to expand their internal incubator, even though it only takes 67days to take new mobile banking apps from development into customer's hands
• A recent study reaffirmed that Asian countries lead the countries in mobile (specifically mobile banking). Particularly in South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, consumers seem to be very comfortable with using their phones to bank or shop online
• In other news (I love saying that, it makes me feel like a newscaster), it appears that mobile banking could also accelerate progress towards Millennium Development Goals.These goals, which mostly focusing on bringing equality and critical infrastructure to third world countries, claims that "the immense potential of branch-less banking as a mechanism that enables vulnerable people to participate in society and economy and that, from an international perspective, can constitute an effective measure to reduce costs linked to transfer of remittances"
• In the discussion of mobile banking, the related topic of security is never that far away, and a new article from Australia claims that cyber criminals are specifically targeting mobile banking mostly because many users/companies neglect to report security breaches (users don't know, companies want to protect their brand) and that this new channel is so ubiquitous that it becomes convenient for cyber criminals to target for all customer information

So it's a pretty mixed bag for mbanking unfortunately, but it does seem that things are progressing- only one of those steps being acknowledging the risks in the process!