AUSTIN, Texas–Growth in consumer mobile banking apps continues to be slow. P2P offerings, however, continue to be hot.
Malauzai Software’s latest Monkey Insights “little-data” report found that for the second year in a row, overall growth was relatively low at 6%. Today there are more than 6,000 mobile banking apps. Growth was also an anemic 6% in 2016, the company reported. Prior to that, growth was 15% or greater each year, the survey had found.
The reason for the tepid growth: saturation. “Pretty much everyone has mobile,” the Monkey Insights report said. “The gaps are, as expected, in the lower end of the asset size of financial institutions. Financial institutions under $100 million in assets have the lowest rates of apps.”
Among the other findings:
- 50% Business Mobile Growth. “OK, the headline sounds great but the reality is not so great,” the company said in its analysis. “The total number of stand-alone business banking mobile apps is a mere 388. It went up by about 120. Put this in perspective. When Consumer Mobile Banking launched, growth year over year in the first few years was 200% to 300%. It, of course, leveled off. Business Mobile never experienced this growth curve. Why? Because businesses don’t use mobile.”
- Card Management Is Here. The Monkey Insights survey reported it found 396 mobile banking apps with Card Controls. “This is the first year we have counted. But already there are more of these than stand-alone business mobile apps. And very interesting to note, we could find ZERO stand-alone card management apps. OK, not exactly zero; we actually found only one-two, which is actually worse than zero…Long live integrated card management. That is, put it in your mobile banking app!”
- 100% P2P Growth. “Person-to-Person payments took off this year,” Malauzai Software reported, as “100% more financial institutions added P2P. There are now 771 who offer it in some form or another. Recent Monkey Insights have shed light on very low usage of bank-integrated P2P. But alas, the banks and CUs want it and it is becoming a requirement. This growth highlights a growing trend as well. Interestingly, the close neighbor A2A, or transferring money to yourself, is only offered by 125 financial institutions, much lower than P2P. Curious, because usually the two services can be rolled out together with minimal incremental effort.”