However, the scope of mobile digital banking is extending rapidly to further types of financial products and services, especially the introduction of secure wallets on mobile devices.
According to the latest market study by Juniper Research, a mobile banking service is currently available in most regions of the world, driven by exceptional consumer demand -- especially within the developed regions.
Juniper Research study findings uncovered that over 1.75 billion mobile phone users will have used their device for banking purposes by the end of 2019 -- that's compared to 800 million this in 2014.
Providers such as the Bank of America have already announced, back in 2013, that more of their customers are now logging in to their mobile services than through their online web access system.
Mobile Channel Market Development
Juniper notes that emerging countries across the world -- such as China, India and Bangladesh -- also witnessed significant growth in the past 12 months. Moreover, the growth outlook is very bright.
"The level of maturity in the number and innovation of services being offered in the market across several geographical areas, demonstrates that banks now regard the mobile channel as an indispensable revenue-stream," said Nitin Bhas, principal analyst at Juniper Research.
However, with the mobile channel becoming a key customer retention strategy, it presents a great challenge to the more traditional legacy financial services institutions that historically resist change.
The scale of this challenge has been confirmed by the decreasing number of branch visits by consumers and also the closure of physical bank branches over the past 12-24 months. For example, in April 2014, RBS UK announced the closure of 44 branches across the United Kingdom.
Mobile Banking App Adoption Rises
The study findings also notes that nearly 100 percent of the banks analysed had some sort of mobile (SMS, Browser and App based) and online banking offering.
Almost every bank surveyed reported having software apps available for at least one smartphone operating system. Moreover, it's anticipated that additional services and more transactions will migrate to the mobile cloud over time.
Today, banking apps are ranked highly among the most downloaded financial apps in various mobile app stores globally, with banks reporting a high number of average transactions per month per user.
