Skip to main content

Digital Banking Users will Reach 2 Billion Worldwide

The retail banking sector continues to pursue digital transformation projects. Mobile devices are key to their strategy, as banks move to a ‘mobile first’ approach. It's a global trend supported by the scale of a declining financial services workforce, and the number of physical branches.

According to the latest market study by Juniper Research, over 2 billion users will access retail banking services via smartphones, media tablets, PCs and smartwatches in 2018 -- that's up by 10 percent year-over-year.

Digital Banking Market Development

The new research found that accelerated adoption in key emerging markets -- such as India and China -- means that mobile banking users now represent 50 percent of the global banked population. Juniper expects that the number of global mobile banking users will now overtake online users in 2018 -- 2 years earlier than previously anticipated.

2017 saw banks worldwide engaging in both technology investments and new tech offerings, although the extent of these activities varied considerably.

Juniper analyzed leading tier-1 banks to evaluate their 'digital transformation readiness' scores and highlight their respective positioning within the digital innovation roadmap.


According to the Juniper assessment, the leading group of banks include: Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Citi, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, RBS, Societe Generale, UniCredit and Wells Fargo.

These banks once again scored highly, offering a wide range of digital banking portfolios and investing in the rapid development of technology and customer enablement.

"They were found to be in the mature phase of digital transformation, approaching the final stages of objectives as defined in their current roadmap. These players also lead in customer training and employee development programs, with regards to digital technology," said Nitin Bhas, head of research at Juniper Research.

Outlook for Global Digital Banking Growth

As these banks continue towards digital transformation, technology offerings are also becoming increasingly advanced. For example, chatbot offerings deliver a greater differentiation from a normal app experience, particularly where customer service is concerned.

Juniper estimates customer service cost savings achieved through the deployment of conversational chatbot platforms will reach $4.5 billion by 2022.

Popular posts from this blog

AI Agents Have Memory. Where is The Security?

Enterprise AI adoption keeps running into the same wall: the moment sensitive data, model weights, or agent memory leave a tightly controlled environment, security teams lose visibility into what happens to them while the workload is actually running. Confidential computing exists to close that gap, and new research from ABI Research shows the technology has matured enough, across CPUs, GPUs, containers, and now agentic AI, to become a foundational requirement for enterprises building sovereign AI infrastructure: computing environments they control end to end rather than simply rent. Protection is Moving From CPUs to GPUs ABI Research finds that CPU-based confidential computing is closest to mass-market adoption, the product of years spent hardening chip-level isolation for general workloads. GPU-based confidential computing is now generating the strongest momentum, and for good reason. It addresses one of the largest unresolved gaps in AI security: protecting data and models while inf...