In a clash of the banking titans, Wells Fargo & Co. beat JPMorgan Chase in online banking last quarter – but JPM topped Wells in mobile.
Wells Fargo, the San Francisco bank, increased its online banking users by about 8% last quarter compared to the same quarter in 2012, to 22.7 million users. JPM, though, managed only 6.2% growth last quarter, increasing its online banking user base to 32.2 million.
Both companies released their 2Q earning on July 12.
However, JPM did better than Wells in mobile banking. JPM’s mobile banking user base climbed to 14 million last quarter, a 31.6% increase compared to the second quarter of 2012. That growth topped Wells’s. The bank managed 29% growth in its mobile banking user base, to 10.7 million users.
JPM and Wells are arguably the best proxies for online and mobile banking activity among major banks in the United States. JPM, the New York bank, and Wells, the San Francisco venture, are today largely the leading major banks in innovation. This is why it is important to note that while JPM grew its mobile banking user base at a greater clip last quarter, its ratio of mobile-to-online banking users of 43.5% is lower than Wells’s, which was 47.1% at the end of last quarter. These could be the most important data points of all.
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In other earnings news, Wells said it increased the number of products it has sold to each of its retail banking households, which the bank calls its cross-sell ratio, to 6.14 products per household, up from 6.00 during the second quarter of 2012.