Banks and Credit Unions Are Winning Mobile P2P Users

Mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) services are great for exchanging money with friends and family members. Many banks and credit unions offer mobile P2P payment services, but do a poor job making people aware of it. The result: Only 7% of online consumers have used mobile P2P in the last month.

By Insights from Rob Rubin

Published on June 4th, 2013 in Mobile Banking

Today, many of the largest banks offer mobile P2P services to their customers and most don’t charge fees. Some smaller institutions provide P2P services through their online banking websites, but most haven’t rolled out their P2P service to their mobile platform. We recently fielded a survey on FindABetterBank to measure consumer take-up of mobile P2P and found only 7% of online consumers have used a mobile P2P service in the last 30 days. We found that younger consumers are more likely to use mobile P2P because they don’t have engrained customs on how to exchange money with people, are comfortable using smartphones, and are most likely to want to exchange small sums of money with people while they’re on-the-go.

Adoption of Mobile P2P Payments Skews Towards Younger Consumers

p2p_payments_by_age

Why is usage so low? Financial institutions haven’t done a great job building awareness of the feature – it’s difficult to find information about mobile P2P on many banks’ and credit unions’ websites and most consumers don’t know what "P2P" means. Instead of using industry jargon like "P2P", marketers should describe how it works. For example: "Do you always borrow money because you run out of cash? Now you can payback your friend on the spot by sending money to his email address or mobile phone."

Please visit Novarica read more about their mobile payment survey results.

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