Mobile banking to generate 90 billion SMS by 2015

Mobile banking services worldwide will be generating 90 billion text messages per annum by 2015, up from 30 billion this year, according to figures released by Juniper Research on Tuesday. The figure equates to one message every two days for each user of mobile banking services, Juniper said.

The firm said that SMS messaging represents an opportunity for banks to drive significant improvements in customer service, while simultaneously slashing the costs associated with call centre customer management.

While balance alert SMS services are increasingly common among banks, Juniper suggested that SMS can be used to offer a wider range of services. “Banks are seeking to exploit these new process alerts to speed up customer communications during applications for products such as loans and mortgages,” Juniper said.

There is decent traction for mobile services within the retail banking community, with more than 80 per cent of banks offering some kind of mobile banking function, the firm said. Nonetheless it reported that some banks are “still to seize the potential of SMS services”. By the end of the forecast period, Western Europe will have the highest penetration of mobile banking users, and transactional mobile banking will have seen similar growth rates to SMS, Juniper said.