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MacroMonitor Market Trends June 2013

MacroMonitor Market Trends is a newsletter from Consumer Financial Decisions (CFD) that highlights topical news and trends of interest to you and your colleagues. If you would like more information about the newsletter topic or would like to discuss other ways that we can assist you in your research or marketing efforts, please contact us.

Banking on Mobility

Smartphone use for financial services more than doubled between 2010 (15%) and 2012 (39%). The rapid increase in use makes the rate of mobile-device adoption similar to the adoption rate of computer use for financial services between 2000 (13%) and 2002 (33%). Household ownership of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets with internet access has increased from 48 million in 2010 to over 66 million households in 2012.

Trend of Computer and Mobile-Device Use for Financial Services

Many questions exist about mobile-device use for financial services, but one of the most important questions for providers is, At what rate will consumers adopt smartphones as a transaction-payment platform?

Trend of Households' Transaction-Payment Options

Although households differ, the majority of households make about the same number of transactions each month; the addition of a new payment method does not increase the number of their transactions. Therefore, as a household adopts a new method, its use of one or more previously used transaction options declines. For example, the widespread adoption of credit cards affected the use of cash and checks. The increase in debit-card use correlates with declines in the use of credit cards and retail-store charge cards. An analysis of data from the 2010–11 and 2012–13 MacroMonitor helps in understanding how the introduction of mobile financial services will affect the current distribution of households' transaction choices.

Learn more about which households are using mobile devices for transactions and which for information—such as account balances. Find out which households are early adopters, quick followers, mainstream users, and lagging Luddites. For this information and answers to other financial-services questions, please contact CFD.

For more insights about households' use of financial services on mobile devices, MacroMonitor sponsors may access the Segment Summary Mobile-Banking Households, available through your company's SBI/CFD landing page. Sponsors may request a full presentation about mobile-banking households, including a customized and proprietary Q&A session. Sponsors may always request Segment Summaries about other populations.