comScore Reports Mobile Audience Grows 51 Percent

"The mobile browser is the leading access method for seeking local information, with 20.7 million users in March 2009, up 34 percent versus year ago. However, the strongest growth in the category is coming from downloaded applications, which grew 83 percent versus year ago, followed by SMS at 72 percent." Continue Reading >>

Mobile Banking from Fifth-Third

There's no mention of the product on their website, but I just discovered that Fifth-Third bank now has a browser-based mobile banking site located at: www.53.com/mobile

Bank of America Drives a Half-Million Customers to Web-Based Mobile Banking

The other day I received some interesting news. The scoop is that TowerGroup has just released a new report analyzing the Bank of America mobile banking solution. As a reminder BofA is utilizing a browser-based solution and completed the rollout on August 24th of this year.

Interesting note, if you divide the 500,000 mobile banking users by their roughly 20 million online clients we know that their penetration rate is roughly 2.5% of their online banking customer base.

PS - Please do not misunderstand, I'm not advocating that online banking clients should be the sole target market, and I'm certain that this is not the BofA strategic plan. I'm simply trying to frame their rate of adoption based upon existing data.

Mergers, Conversions and Mobile Banking

This evening as we wrapped up the tasks for our conversion something occurred to me. In the very near future banks will need to add a mobile banking plan to their bank-wide conversion process. This channel has enough intricacies that it could not conceivably be lumped into the retail online banking or business online banking tasks.

In addition, this is yet another reason for banks to offer a robust mobile solution encompassing: browser based, SMS, and Rich UX solutions. Can you imagine trying to convert a base of customers that passionately use SMS banking to a system that only offers a Rich UX downloadable application?