Rating: Existing mobile banking apps still not mobile friendly enough
Banks in the UK will struggle to get widespread adoption of NFC payments if a survey of UK adults carried out last month [july 2012] by YouGov on behalf of Firstsource Solutions is to be believed. The research found that over half (58 per cent) of UK smartphone owners were unlikely to ‘swipe’ [using NFC] their smartphone to make payments – even if their smartphones supported it. The common fear that personal bank details would not be secure over such a connexion was the main reason given by two thirds (67 per cent) of respondents. And that’s two thirds of those who said that they’d be willing to use NFC. More worrying for the Banks is that over a fifth (22 per cent) do not believe the technology will work at all. GoMobile News blames those strange TV ads aired by Barclays for the lack of confidence in NFC.Overall, mobile banking has yet to take off in the UK in a big way. The survey found that a third of smartphone owners are willing to do any mobile banking.
A further 13 per cent don’t do very much mobile banking which – if you add the two figures together, means that 80 per cent of smartphone users have not embraced mobile banking in the UK.
Somewhat contradictory, the survey found that almost half of smartphone owners (47 per cent) would be willing to spend around £5 by swiping their smartphone.
That figure drops dramatically to one in five (21 per cent) when the amount rises to £25 and falls to one in twenty (9 per cent) when the amount reaches £75.
The good news is that youngsters are more open to the ‘mobile wallet’ approach with 42 per cent of 18-24 year olds saying they would be likely to swipe their smartphone if the handset supported it.
Just like GoMobile News, one in five (20 per cent) said that it is difficult to pass relevant security checks when using a smartphone.
We haven’t doublechecked but GoMobile News assumes that with HSBC, you still have to carry around that irritating mini-calculator code generator to be able to do anything sensible.
Hence, one in ten (10 per cent) say the mobile banking apps they have tried are not good enough while over a third (35 per cent) are put off by the small size of smartphone screens.
In other words, they’ve yet to encounter a good truly mobile-aware banking app.
“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,” Iain Regan, global head of sales & marketing with Firstsource Solutions, suggested.
He continued, “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.”
© Dollargate Publishing 2012. All rights reserved.
