Despite much of the hype about banking moving into the smartphone sphere through mobile apps, new research is showing that 80% of users haven’t embraced it, and 58% are showing no interest in a ‘mobile wallet’.
Yougov surveyed 2148 respondents on behalf of Firstsource Solutions. For the purposes of the research, Yougov defines mobile banking as using a smartphone to pay bills, transfer money, check account balances and other financial transactions.
Much of the reticence appears to come from security fears – 55% of those surveyed stated that they were concerned that their bank account details would not be safe. Another 35% said that the small size of smartphone screens was a problem.
One in five (20%) say that it is too difficult to pass relevant security checks when using a smartphone and 10% say the mobile banking apps they have tried are not good enough – certainly a problem in the UK.
Furthermore, 58% of UK smartphone owners were unlikely to swipe their smartphone like a credit card to make payments, even if they were able to. While again security was an issue (67%), 22% quite simply don’t believe the technology, such as NFC, will work.
"Customers still have a lack of trust in mobile banking security which banks need to overcome by providing reassurance of security while at the same time making security procedures intuitive and easy to use. This challenge can be overcome, but banks will need to make banking applications more user friendly while at the same time ensuring security. This is quite a challenge that will need banks, software developers, security experts, as well as customer service specialists to collaborate in order to convince their customers to adopt mobile banking services," said Iain Regan, Global Head of Sales & Marketing at Firstsource Solutions.
Surprisingly, these figures are repeated amongst youth. Just 42% of 18-24 year olds want to ‘swipe’ their phones to make financial transactions, 70% not believing the technology to be secure.
