The mobile ecosystem is simultaneously evolving and expanding—is your independent community bank or credit union prepared to keep up? Jim Marous takes a look at recent trends and discusses how the financial services industry must respond in order to offer consumers the experience they expect on the platforms that they prefer.
According to Deloitte’s seventh annual Global Mobile Consumer Survey, dependence on mobile devices has stabilized, while major shifts in usage patterns are still occurring. According to Marous, this indicates that the growth of mobile banking will need to come from delivering added value that improves a consumer’s daily life.
While smartphone penetration and usage is stabilizing, consumers are increasingly demanding other wireless devices, such as tablets, eBooks, fitness bands, smart watches, and more. Players in the banking industry must look beyond the phone as they seek new ways to deliver mobile banking solutions. Aiming to make systems agnostic—able to flow seamlessly from one device to another—is key. Expanding on the ways that financial institutions communicate with customers is also an important area.
While industry observers have been predicting for years that the use of mobile payments will explode, reality is that evolution in this area has been relatively slow. That’s not to say that financial institutions should abandon mPayment use, but that they must seek a better value proposition that offsets the simplicity of traditional payment methods. Additionally, security is a big consumer concern in this area.
New advanced technologies—the Internet of Things, wearables, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, virtual reality, AI, and machine learning—hold exciting, but uncertain, possibilities for application within the banking industry. Consumer concerns about security and privacy are, once again, of note here. The author suggests that there is an opportunity here for banks and credit unions to establish themselves at the center of the “identity ecosystem” by focusing on ways for consumers to protect their identity and keep data secure.
Marous concludes that “to succeed, financial organizations will need to significantly improve current mobile banking offerings, while innovating to leverage other advanced technologies.”
For more details, read the article in full at The Financial Brand.