How the mobile is changing our monetary transactions

Hard cash, sterling, money, notes and coins have been a part of our everyday lives for centuries, the idea of leaving the house and heading to a store without them would have seemed like madness years ago, however billions of cashless transactions are now taking place everyday.

One in five Brits never carries cash, they want to pay by their contactless card, or by their smartphone, with half of Brits surveyed by First Bus stating that ‘cash is on the way out.’

Retailers have led the way in already adjusting their payment options to suit the modern day customer, and those that have, have seen huge benefits and uplifts. 39% of 2017 Black Friday sales were made through a smartphone, making it the device of choice beating the desktop and tablet to the lion share of the sales. (Source: IMRG)

Mobile banking is now huge. More and more of us are engaged with our mobile banking apps as they can  fulfil most if not all of our banking needs. 63% of smartphone users have at least one financial app on their smartphone, with the average smartphone user having 2.5 financial apps. (Source: Bankrate)

There has been a huge shift in the way we bank in the UK. The ‘Way we bank now’ a report from the trade body UK Finance states, that 71% of the adult UK population accessed their bank via their smartphone app in 2017, with 22 million people stating they use their mobile banking app at least once a week. These figures have more than doubled over the last few years, showing a huge trend in the UK’s preference in banking and dealing with monitory transactions.

Conversely, the branches are seeing a decline in footfall, 104 average daily visits in 2017 is a decline of 26% from the 2012 figures.

With this new way of banking needs to come a new direction of communicating with those customers, and our banks are having huge successes with the good and reliable SMS. 512 million text alerts were sent in 2017 in the UK by banks, that equates to 16 texts per second.

Transactional messages and notifications are perfect for SMS, any important information that needs to be received instantly and acted upon, is best sent via a text message. It’s quick, simple and convenient for both businesses and customers, 98% of all text messages are now read, and looking at the stats above, it is more than likely that it will be the device that the recipient will be using to respond to the action/information sent in the text message.

But it is not just banks that are using text messages to inform their customers about monetary matters, the whole financial services and utilities sector is gaining huge benefits from sending out their debt collections and other transactional messages via text message.

“Technology is changing the way we communicate, work and shop and, as a result, the way we choose to manage our money. The industry has responded to this seismic social change, which is very much led by customers looking to make the most of digital innovation for convenience.”
Stephen Jones, Chief Executive of UK Finance

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