Newsroom

January 11, 2018

Fed survey: Mobile banking a 'standard' service for consumers

A survey from the Federal Reserve district banks found 89 percent of financial institutions already offer mobile banking services to their members and customers. It also revealed that more credit unions market mobile banking services to underbanked consumers than banks.

The report on the 2016 Mobile Financial Services Survey, released this month, led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, included responses from financial institutions in seven districts. Of the 706 institutions that participated in the survey, 186 were credit unions.

The survey found that 97 percent of financial institutions plan to offer mobile banking services by this year. Credit unions are more likely than banks to support specialized mobile banking features such as credit card account services: A majority of credit union respondents (53 percent) currently offer mobile credit card account services compared to only 12 percent of banks.

About one-third of credit unions said they currently market mobile banking services to underbanked consumers, with an additional 25 percent planning to market the services in the next two years. Only 22 percent of banks currently market the services, with about the same amount planning to within two years.

Respondents revealed their primary concern with providing mobile banking services is consumers not protecting their own information. In order to prevent potential breaches, more than 80 percent said their mobile banking platform has inactivity timeouts, multi-factor authentication and mobile alerts.

While mobile banking is readily available from financial institutions, only 24 percent currently offer mobile payments, which allow use of mobile phone to pay for goods at the point of sale. However, an additional 40 percent indicated plans to offer mobile payments by 2018.

In addition, strong majorities of respondents said their financial institution would support various mobile wallets by 2018: 99 percent would support Apple Pay, 84 percent Android Pay and 70 percent Samsung Pay.

Full survey results are available here.