Business Mobile Banking Remains Less Than Perfect

Business mobile has failed. We can try to sugarcoat the message, but reality is reality: It is less than perfect. To begin with, financial institutions have failed to deliver stand-alone, purpose-built apps for businesses. There are few business mobile stand-alone apps in the App Store and Google Play. Approximately 400 institutions have launched a business-specific mobile app. That compares to more than 6,000 consumer mobile banking apps. When offered the option by a credit union or bank, only 10% of active business end-users are choosing to access their accounts via a mobile device. This again is far short of the consumer numbers, where 40% of usage takes place via mobile devices.

In contrast to the mobile device, when we look at digital banking usage in a more general sense, we know businesses use the digital channel frequently, but the data tells us the business user stays on the desktop. Business users access digital banking four times a week and stay online for almost seven minutes per session, which is 300% longer than the time period consumers stay online. But the business users don't use their mobile phones – they stay on the desktop. They have access to mobile apps and mobile websites, and they do not use them.

And it makes sense. Most businesses will not even let employees use their personal mobile phones for anything work-related, much less for installing an app to make a wire transfer. If you owned a business, would you want that data installed on an employee's phone, where it could get lost or be abused? No. Then why are we surprised to hear no one uses their mobile phone to conduct business banking?

Why is it that we are surprised when we look at the data and see less than 10% of business employees who access the digital channel use a mobile device? Ninety percent of the use takes place on the desktop. The average session duration on a mobile device is 30% of the session length on a desktop and lasts just over two minutes. And mobile transactions are lower in both volume and value. Less than 7% of ACH originations are completed from a mobile device and mobile wires are basically nonexistent – less than 1% of wires originate from a mobile device.

The iPhone pretty much exclusively owns the smartphone space when it comes to businesses; there are very few Android users – less than 1% of business mobile usage originates from an Android device. The iPad does better at about double the business banking usage through smartphones, but it's still well below desktop business digital. Overall, the usage is low and the desktop rules business digital. The data doesn't lie. Mobile business banking has failed. But is it the fault of the chicken or the egg? Very few financial institutions have launched purpose-built stand-alone apps for business consumers – as stated above, about 400, which is a very low number. And with less than 10% of business users opting for mobile, we can call it a clear failure, but is that because there is a lack of usefulness and demand, or because the apps have failed to excite businesses and financial institutions in terms of their features and functions? Will businesses ever flock to mobile? Can we overcome basic facts, like the fact that business owners don't want their employees to have the banking app on their personal phones? And, as business owners shift toward the younger generations, might mobile banking become important? Do current business owners, who generally lean toward older generations, care enough to embrace mobile?

What we do know is businesses are slow to embrace mobile in a very general sense. Less than 10% of businesses with websites have a native app in the App Store, according to Malauzai Research Institute 2016 data. Maybe their lack of mobile banking use is influenced by the fact that the typical business – and there are 26 million of them in the United States – just doesn't care about mobile. That said, maybe not. The most successful mobile payments app comes from a business: Starbucks. Not Apple Pay or Venmo, but Starbucks, a business that publishes its own app and is profoundly changing how it takes payments (more than 20% of Starbucks' payments come through the app). And more businesses are following suit. WalmartPay has experienced serious growth in the past few quarters, and others such as CVS and Target are jumping in with their own payment-oriented apps. Who knows, maybe payments can be a driver for business mobile.

Today, businesses are not using the mobile channel. It is not so much a failure of the businesses or marketing, but more of a fundamental failure of solving important problems for businesses via mobile. Mobile simply does not solve big issues for businesses. Business mobile and business digital in general can and will be very successful. The value proposition is there, it's just not fully materialized.

Adding a payments function might help (thank you Starbucks for leading the way). Whatever the driver may be, this initial “mobile failure” for businesses can now be countered with “mobile innovation,” and in the end, businesses will benefit. And then we can celebrate business mobile success!

Robb Gaynor is the Chief Product Officer at Malauzai. He can be contacted at 512-961-5699 or [email protected].

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