Media releases

Mobile banking a big hit at Westpac

 

22 May 2012

The trend towards mobile banking across Australia is accelerating with Westpac now having one million personal and business customers using smart phones to access their accounts on a regular basis.

The passing of the one million mark this month comes as usage of smart phones on the group’s mobile banking channels has grown by 90 per cent in the last 12 months.1

This increase in customers has seen mobile activity now account for 30% of all online sessions, growing 150% over the past year.

Westpac has the highest level of customer satisfaction for mobile banking amongst its peers including the use of its dedicated mobile banking app as well as overall service satisfaction.2

“Banking is being transformed by the use of technology such as smart phones and these figures prove that this trend is only going to accelerate,” said Jason Yetton, Group Executive, Westpac Retail & Business Banking.

“They also show how popular smart phone apps such as our own are, but the important thing we are finding is that customers want ease of use, fast download speeds, a good range of tasks, reliability and the knowledge that their transactions are secure. These are the key factors to ‘banking on the go’.”

Harry Wendt, Westpac’s General Manager of Online & Mobile, said: “Not only does this place us at the cutting edge of the banking revolution it also justifies the investment that we have made and continue to improve the experience for our customers.”

“It is one thing to produce mobile apps but it is another altogether to have the systems to support them so that we can guarantee the service that our customers of smart phone banking now demand. We are just at the beginning of this transformation.”

Increasing use of mobile banking

  • Google/IPSP research revealed last year that Australia had the second highest smart phone penetration in the world at 37 per cent and that we were also consuming more apps.
  • Usage of Westpac’s mobile banking channels now exceeds more than 2 million sessions each week while the number of transactions by small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) – the primary users of mobile banking – has since skyrocketed to 3.5 billion over the last six months.3
  • SMEs make up 15 per cent of the current active Westpac mobile banking user base which is around 150,000 customers of total users.
  • Around 10 per cent of mobile customers now only use this channel to move their money around and no longer sign on via a PC.
  • The increasing usage of mobile banking is also driving better customer advocacy numbers with eight out of 10 customers saying they enjoy the ease of use of the new Westpac mobile services.

 
1 The 12 month period between April 2011 and April 2012
2 Source: Australian Mobility Banking Program, RFi, March 2012
3 The six month period between October 2011 and April 2012