Mobile phones have evolved well beyond simple communication devices, and smartphones are becoming more and more like personal assistants, where we can manage all of our diary dates and personal finance matters – banking app technology means we can all manage our money with the swipe of the screen.
So, could your smartphone become your new bank?
The rise and rise of banking apps
We’re turning more and more to our smartphones to manage our money – data from the British Bankers Association shows that from 2016 to 2017, the number of people using banking to manage their savings jumped 30%, tracking of credit card usage increased 46%, while the number of people handling larger accounts like mortgages and investments over their phone jumped by a whopping 86%.
Banks now send more than 16 text alerts every second, with around 512 million alerts sent last year to inform people their salary had been paid in or that they were heading into an overdraft.
Three of the UK’s largest banks are seeing more and more people download their banking apps year-0n-year — Lloyds Group, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) added millions of mobile users in 2016, reaching 8 million, 5.7 million, and 4.2 million mobile banking customers, respectively. This has resulted in skyrocketing usage — from 2012 to 2017, consumer use of banking apps increased 356%.
A UK Finance report entitled The Way We Bank Now has revealed there were about 5.5 billion log-ins to banking apps last year, a 13% rise on the previous year.
Mobile banking is most popular among millennials, with almost 59% of 16 to 24-year-olds and 69% of 25 to 34-year-olds using their smartphones. In contrast, almost half (49%) of 65-year-olds bank online.
It’s even been forecast that smartphone banking apps will overtake computer-based online banking by as early as next year, – gone are the days of banking apps simply allowing you to check your balance, and they;re now regularly used to do everything from setting up standing orders, to transferring money to friends or clients.
What’s the future of banking app technology?
Given the immediacy of online payments, it seems odd that some transactions still take time to clear into one account or another – but a new payment system, going by the working name of New Payments Architecture, could soon put an end to all this.
Designed to be operational in the next few years, the new system will offer real-time balances and 24/7 payments, meaning salaries could be paid on the same day each month, even on weekends, putting an end ‘pending transactions’.
The new tech will also enable the identity of a payee, instead of having to identify the correct account number and sort-code, which means invoices and other information could be attached to payments, helping business with their reconciliation of payments.
Use your smartphone for quick and easy conference calls
Smartphone don’t only make banking a lot easier, they’re also one of the quickest and simplest ways to make a conference call, especially if you use our NFC wallet card – simply tap the Wallet Card with your smartphone and it will automatically dial into your conference call! So no need to enter your PIN ever again!
