Daoud Fakhri, analyst at Datamonitor, said: “Although we predict that mobile banking will overtake online banking in the future, only 16% of UK consumers currently think it’s important.
“However, we expect that this will change rapidly once the technology becomes more sophisticated and we’ll see adoption increasing at a far quicker rate than it did in the case of online. The key reason for this is that mobile banking has the potential to be far more convenient than online, so if banks are able to offer the same or similar functionality to online, consumers are likely to start to use mobile banking.”
Mobile banking is more sophisticated in many developing countries because of the lack of robust infrastructure. For example it can be difficult for consumers to get to bank branches and access computers. Mobiles are therefore the easiest way to communicate with banks, creating high levels of demand. In fact 60% of consumers in Brazil feel that the technology is important making the development of mobile banking a priority for banks.