Tag: mobile banking

According to a new report, the large financial institutions are falling behind with the latest tech.

Despite the fact that mobile banking and payments are right at our doorstep and are being used at an increasing rate, in Canada, almost half of all banking execs don’t believe that they have the IT systems, infrastructure, and processes in place to be able to meet present – let alone future – customer needs and expectations over their smartphones.

The report was entitled “Banks: Customers Expect That You’re Always On and Available, Are You Ready?”

The report was made by CenturyLink and it pointed out that even some of the central services still require better IT. It pointed out that when it come to mobile banking and technology, about 40 percent of C-level financial execs who were surveyed didn’t feel that the IT infrastructure was in place for meeting the basic banking service needs to the level of customer expectations. CenturyLink’s managing director of financial services, Roji Oommen, said that “To stay competitive in a technology-driven marketplace, Canadian banks must be both financial institutions and mobile technology innovators.”

While mobile banking may not yet be keeping up with technology, it’s not that the resources aren’t out there.

The hope that CenturyLink certainly has from the insight in this report is that the banks will see that it and companies like it area already offering the types of services that will help those financial institutions to get themselves on the right path. These strategic technology partners do actually have the potential to spot the mobile tech solutions that are needed and to help in their integration – if not implement them on behalf of those Canadian banks.

The report also determined that 78 percent of banking execs in the country felt that customer demand for improved mobile banking and technology based services would cause them to be required to do more outsourcing. It stated that when those execs were asked about what parts of their IT are currently being outsourced, 86 percent said that they did so for IT infrastructure requirements, while another 72 percent said that they were outsourcing for their IT security.

In the U.K., a rising number of people feel that they will be using their smartphones regularly in stores.

Though mobile payments have been slow to take off, they are rapidly becoming more popular and now a new study based on a survey from Lloyds Bank has shown that many consumers feel that they will be regularly using this tech within five years from now.

In fact, one quarter of the study participants felt that by the end of 5 years, mobile phones would replace cash.

One in four participants in the U.K. study felt that between mobile payments and contactless cards, they would no longer need to carry cash. Moreover, recent statistics from Barclaycard have revealed that contactless spending in the United Kingdom is three times greater than it had been a year ago. In the Lloyds survey, conducted by Ipsos Mori, with the participation of more than 2,000 people, 43 percent of consumers agreed that technology is the way that payments are going in the future.

The survey also showed that 1 in 3 people feel that mobile payments will be used daily in five years’ time.

Over the summer, Apple Pay made its way into the U.K., drawing a considerable spotlight to the concept of mobile wallets. That said, while there are quite a few people who believe that mobile devices will become a typical payment method within the next five years, there also remains a much larger number that has stated that this technology will never become their primary choice for completing payment transactions.

According to the stats from the survey, it looks as though it is younger consumers who are more enthusiastic about the use of their mobile devices for this purpose than their counterparts who are 45 years of age or older.

When survey participants were asked about why they were not yet using mobile payments, 44 percent stated that they were not satisfied with the security or safety of the transactions. Another 18 percent said that their mobile devices were not compatible with the necessary technology, and 17 percent said that they didn’t know anything about this form of transaction.