Cellphone banking has overtaken Internet banking as the most popular mode of doing banking, the ‘Mobility 2009’ survey results revealed on Tuesday.
The second phase of this survey, which was conducted by business technology research company World Wide Worx (WWW) and sponsored by banking firm First National Bank (FNB) and mobile technology company Blackberry, highlighted that 28% of customers were now using cellphone banking, compared with 17% in 2007.
Trust is the main factor for people not using cellphone banking, followed by the lack of know-how.
In South Africa, more people are currently using cellphone banking than Internet banking. About 10% of customers use cellphone and Internet banking, 6% use only Internet banking, 18% use only cellphone banking and 66% of customers in South Africa do not use any electronic channels.
The services that are driving cellphone banking are balance enquiries, transaction notification and airtime purchases. Prepaid services, such as airtime and electricity, show large growth.
Consumer field research provider Dashboard’s MD Peter Searll said that the survey found that the highest satisfaction experienced from cellphone banking is notifications.
FNB Commerce CEO Len Pienaar revealed that cellphone penetration at the bank is reaching one-third of all customers.
In September 2009, FNB processed transactions worth R745-million through different interactive cellphone banking services. It currently has over one-million registered cellphone banking customers, with the black working-class citizen as the average cellphone banker.
“Cellphone banking is the first technology that crosses income, generation and racial barriers,” said Pienaar.
He pointed out that unstructured supplementary service data, which is a simple text exchange service that allows the display of menus on a mobile phone, enabling users to interact with these menus, will introduce cellphone banking into Africa, as it is as easy and simple to use as short message systems. Cellphone banking on wireless application protocol is also a trend that is expected to grow.
Pienaar said that entry-level market cellphone banking has become the primary customer interface, as it has become an important, common and alternative banking channel.
“All cellphone banking market segments have reached exponential growth rates especially in entry-level segments,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, WWW MD Arthur Goldstuck said at a presentation of the findings that features and affordability are key drivers in the use of cellphones. Email and Internet applications are the biggest areas of proportional growth, while the camera application is currently the most widely used features on a cellphone, but will not offer market growth to manufacturers.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Cellphone banking becoming more popular with customers
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