Research from Varo Money reveals that Americans today — especially Millennials — don’t spend much time thinking about banking. They are making fewer trips to the bank than they did in the past, and they spend little time making budgets. However, they are eager to see how artificial intelligence (AI) can take over some of the more mundane aspects of banking an improve their financial lives.
79% of American adults — including a whopping 85% of Millennials — believe that AI could help them better manage their finances. More than one third (36%) said they would appreciate an AI that could help them calculate and implement a savings plan. Three in ten think AI would give them better visibility into how they spend, and an equal number say AI would cut down on the number of errors they make when managing their accounts.
29% of respondents said that they felt the advice they would get from an AI-driven banking experience would be unbiased, and nearly as many (28%) said AI would help them “see the big picture” when it comes to their financial lives.
Half of Americans agree that an AI assistant would be better than they are at creating a budget, and 44% say that an AI assistant would be better at saving money.
The vast majority of all Americans (83%) would take advantage of AI features if their bank offered them. Even more Millennials feel the same way (89%).
Roughly half of the survey’s respondents said they would be comfortable leveraging AI to analyze their cash flow and automatically pay their bills. Two out of five Americans also would use AI to set up an automatic savings plan.
“Americans today — particularly Millennials — understand how technologies like AI are going to fundamentally change our lives,” said Colin Walsh, co-founder and CEO of Varo Money. “A mobile-only bank that puts AI to work can give people a complete financial picture. It can proactively notify them about their spending patterns, help them bridge cash traps, and,ultimately achieve their financial goals with maximum ease and minimal hassle.”
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Everyone Loves Mobile Banking, But Millennials Love It More
While 90% of Americans say they still visit the bank at least once a year, only 37% make the trip more often than once per each month, and only 5% visit daily. When it comes to making budgets, 63% of Americans spend fewer than three hours each month making them.
Nine out of ten U.S. consumers believe that mobile banking is better than banking online or in person, citing 24/7 availability. Two thirds of Americans (66%) say that 24/7 access is what they like most about mobile banking, a number that jumps to 74% among Millennials.
Half of all respondents (53%) and 62% of Millennials also like the fact that they can use mobile banking to access their accounts anywhere while they are on-the-go — they don’t have to wait until they get home and log in to a desktop computer.
Roughly half of all participants in the Varo study said they liked that mobile banking kept them from making unnecessary trips to a branch.
However, more than half of Americans (52%) cite frustrations with their current mobile banking solution, which include not having access to their banker at all times (18%), not getting insights or recommendations for their finances (18%), and not being able to set goals or auto-save (17%).
“Americans have become accustomed to managing all aspects of their lives from their phones — their dating lives, their social lives, their work lives,” added Walsh. “Their financial lives should be no different.”