Mobile, Banking and Millennials – Not What You Might Think

Many are saying mobile, mobile, mobile as the way banks must transact and communicate with Millennials. Mobile is certainly important, but FICO’s recent study of US banking consumers tells a more complex story.

While it is true that smartphone and tablet usage are significantly higher than with Boomers or Generation X, as you dig into how they actual are banking and want to bank, the story isn’t all mobile.

PCs/Laptops Trump Smartphones When you look at device usage, Millennials use PCs/laptops at rates similar to smartphones. Some 96% of Millennials regularly use PCs/laptops, and 90% regularly use smartphones; this drops to 63% for tablets. Some 70% of Generation X (35-49 year olds) regularly use smartphones, compared to 98% for PCs/laptops.

Mobile Apps – Not for all Millennials Millenials (at 26%) are far more likely to use a bank’s mobile application than Generation X (12%) or Boomers (3%). However, when looking at the preferred way that Millennials want to transact with their bank, the website plays a more important role.

For push notifications, the story is somewhat similar; one might expect a text-heavy generation like Millennials to exclusively prefer SMS or mobile app notifications for communications, but that isn’t always the case. Often old-school e-mail trumps both text and mobile app notifications as the preferred digital means for push notifications.

Interestingly, 30% of Millennials with smartphones don’t use any banking apps (from their bank, or 3^rd party banking apps). Of those that don’t use banking apps, 45% said they prefer not to conduct banking-related activities on their mobile device.

Frequent Mobile App Users Are Happier Customers One really interesting tidbit in this study: across the board for Millennials, Generation X and Boomers, we saw that customers who more frequently used their bank’s mobile app (at least once per week) were more satisfied with their bank and would recommend it to others.

To get the complete story, download the full study.