See update here.
Bank of America Corp.‘s customers are “now” logging in to the bank’s mobile platform in greater numbers than to its online platform.
That monumental development was disclosed yesterday by Marc Warshawsky, the bank’s senior vice president, mobile solutions executive, at the NetFinance conference, although Warshawsky offered scant details on the frame of reference for this milestone in customer behavior.
Warshawsky also said that Bank of America “allows for mobile account origination,” but again offered few specifics, such as when the bank went live with the change.
Details aside, both developments are monumental because online banking has for at least 15 years been the dominant digital banking channel, especially at BofA, which was a pioneer of online banking in the U.S. These two mobile events should begin to undermine that domination.
Bank of America is the nation’s second largest bank by assets.
Warshawsky said BofA will not stop at the mobile login milestones, but expressed the bank’s — and, in a wider sense, the industry’s — commitment to mobile like this: “If you can do it in a banking center, if you can do it in a call center, if you can do it online, you have to be able to do it on mobile.”
“We see a road to mobile wallet,” he told the audience, even if he did not specify what road that might be. He called out the trends defining mobile banking today: digital convergence, personalization, relevance, geolocation, social media, and improving the quality of communication between banks and customers.
How should banks approach mobile? “Think like a software company,” Warshawsky said. But he added a word of caution to developers: “Not everything is the right thing to do for customers just because you can do it.”
This is a really interesting milestone. For BofA, mobile is now the “front door” of their bank. The implications of this on everything from account opening and cross-sell to fraud and ID authentication are enormous.
I am responsible for mobile banking at my company. I work very closely with the online banking side of the house. This is a trend that is going to continue. To date, in many ways mobile has been seen as an add-on to online banking. Very soon mobile/tablet will be the drivers with online being positioned as an added benefit.
How many of these mobile logins are just to check balances vs execute P2P type transactions? It would be interesting if Mark actually shared some data beyond the login to shed some light on logins versus true functions that are performed in the mobile channel versus online.
Sometimes it seems like they don’t have a handle on their numbers. Case in point the follow up article which states that Bank of America mobile logins do not exceed online banking logins.