How many mbank users are there in Europe and who are they?

I said I would move away from EFMA Week, but the brain
washing achieved a true immersion as I realised there’s one last bit that was
missed: EFMA’s Research.

A lot of good insights came from the week through the
various study presentations, with EFMA performing multiple research from
insurance  to banking to payments.  As Cap Gemini sponsor all of them, the embedded links gives you free
access to everything.  

I should also mention our research before we move on however.  We have two key reports produced each year:

• The European Payments Report (now in its fifth year), sponsored by EBA CLEARING and CGI; and

• The Changing Face of Payments Report (we are about to launch the third), sponsored by Cognizant and VocaLink.

Nevertheless, we are not researching on the scale of EFMA, who seem to have reports on everything, and two specifically caught my
attention on digital channels and social media in banking.

The former gives some good stats about online banking usage
in Europe.  For example, compare and contrast
the UK and France for bank branches, for example, with 193 per million citizens
here versus 596 per million people in France. 
Meantime, access to the internet is highest in the Netherlands (94% of
the population) and lowest in Turkey (47%).

Although internet access may not be ubiquitous in every country,
of those internet users most will logon to their bank via a fixed rather than
mobile place …

… although this is changing too, mostly driven by Gen Y.

A 10% increase in m-banking usage in one year on average is
pretty phenomenal amongst 18-49 year olds, although I also note that the over 70s
are a core m-banking audience too (according to the study, over 70s on the
internet are the largest percentage of online banking aficionados!).

There’s lot more in this research which you can read for
free, but the other session on social media is chargeable, so here’s a few
highlights:

• banks view digital as the primary contact for transactions
  (91%), customer service (67%) and advice and sales (34%)

• a third of banks see digital (internet and mobile) as the
  primary channel for advice and sales today (ed:
  how many believe that will be their main channel tomorrow I wonder?)

• 13% of banks have mature digital channels deployed, but 47%
  still have yet to achieve a fully mature digital offering

• 84% of banks have a Facebook page, 67% twitter, 54% YouTube
  and 31% blog

All in all, it’s useful to have research to offer statistics
to justify points but, as mentioned, many stats become redundant over time.

For example, I mentioned that almost all of us were using
the stat that it took 38 years for radio to get 50 million listeners but just
18 months from the iPad to get 50 million users, to which my friend Dave Birch
responded:

@chris_skinner it took 10 years for everyone's Powerpoint to contain stats about TVs but only 2 years for them to contain stats about iPads

— Dave Birch (@dgwbirch) May 30, 2013

Exactly.

p.s. Dave presented at the Financial Servcies Club Poland this week on the future of payments - blog to appear next week!