If 2011 was the year of the cloud then 2012 is without question the year of mobile banking, as evidenced by the financial institutions, credit unions and companies lining up to bring mobile banking technologies to their offerings.
And, the latest passenger on the mobile banking train is Commonwealth Bank Indonesia, a subsidiary of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, who is excited by the burgeoning mobile banking market in the country which is benefitting the growing number of middle-class people in the largest economy in Southeast Asia.
“Up to 80 percent of [the Indonesian] population is less than 40 years old, 35 percent of whom use social media. If you look at the way people interact and travel in Indonesia, mobile is the key part of that,” Commonwealth Bank Director of Retail and Business Banking Ian Phillip Whitehead said in Singapore on Friday according to a recent article.
The bank’s mobile banking initiative has already been met with resounding success since its inception in June 2011, as 20,000 of Commonwealth Bank’s 150,000 customers have already downloaded the Commonwealth Bank mobile banking applications, which are available on BlackBerry (News - Alert) and iPhone platforms. Perhaps this is not all that surprising, however, given the fact that Indonesia is the biggest user of Blackberry outside of Canada and is the world’s top user of Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter. Simply put, the country is very tech-forward.
Of the 20,000 customers who have downloaded the app, 7,500 are active users of the platform and 35 percent of Commonwealth Bank’s total customer base relies on the bank’s Internet banking services. The bank’s mobile banking applications offer all features that are available in its Internet banking service, such as internal and external money transfer, as well as investment. Not only are the bank’s customers embracing the latest technological innovations but the technology is also transforming customer’s banking habits.
“Before the mobile banking services, customers’ transactions peaked only during lunch time. After mobile banking, the number of transactions was also high before and after lunch time,” Whitehead said.
While the bank has already seen its mobile banking services grow by leaps and bounds in the past year, it is still setting its sights on widespread adoption for its customer base.
“Our target is that 100 percent of our Internet banking users will use our mobile banking services too, by the end of this year,” Whitehead said.
Indonesia is not the only place lately to embrace mobile banking with open arms. Similarly, On Device Research recently released a report looking at the mobile finance activities of mobile Internet users in emerging markets, and found that 53 percent of mobile Internet users in India, Kenya, Indonesia, Ghana and Nigeria have engaged in mobile banking and payment activities.
However, even though these individuals have engaged in mobile banking, less than one percent of mobile phone users in India actually use their mobile devices for conducting banking transactions even though the technology is widely available – an issue that is in large part due to the technology.
For more on adoption of mobile banking in these countries, click here.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey
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