Credit Card News: Technology

Now that consumers are getting a taste of doing their banking via smartphone, it seems they are hungry for more. A recent survey by FICO shows that people would like to do more smartphone banking than they currently do—if only the features they want are available.

The survey, which asked 2,239 adults of all ages across fourteen different countries about what smartphone banking features are most important to them, found that getting information about possible fraudulent charges was one of the most-wanted smartphone app features.

The number one thing people want to do on their phones is check their balances, whether that means bank balance, credit card balance, or payment due balance. This functionality is included with most banking apps, but some of the other requested features weren’t always so easily had.

Other top important features were being notified of potential fraudulent activity, making payments and transferring money. The breakdown of requested features was as follows:

• Checking balances – 75%


• Notifications of possible fraud – 59%


• Making payments from their accounts – 53%


• Transferring money – 50%

Younger people were the most interested in smartphone banking, with folks in the 25 – 39 age bracket saying they are most likely to want to use their phones instead of going to a bank. Specifically, people of that age said they’d like to get bill payment reminders from credit card companies and warnings when they are about to hit their credit limits.

Older folks—those ages 55 and up—were less enthusiastic about using their phones to do their banking. They were especially disinterested in receiving notifications about new products and services, with only 6% of them saying they’d like to get those. Then again, that was the least popular service across all age groups. Only 39% of all respondents wanted to get new product and service alerts via smartphone.

Men were slightly more likely to express interest in smartphone banking, with their votes of interest coming in at 3-4 percentage points higher across all survey questions.

FICO’s vice president of product and technology, Stuart Wells, said that banks have “an unprecedented opportunity to differentiate themselves and strengthen their relationships with their customers” by offering more apps and increased functionality to smartphone users.

Survey respondents were from the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Turkey and the United States.