I was surprised to receive a letter on the weekend from ANZ Bank, with whom I have savings and chequeing accounts, notifying me that they are discontinuing their mobile banking services as of the 14th of May. This after being the first Australian bank to offer such services, to much industry fanfare, back in January 2008.
According an official statement from ANZ made to ZDNet Australia today:
“We’ve found that only about 0.6 per cent of our internet banking users use M-Banking, and most of what they use M-Banking for can be accessed from TXT or Internet Banking,” the statement said.
The bank hinted at future investments it was making in enhancing mobile banking services.
“The major advances in smartphones over the last few years has also meant that our customers now want a service that is simpler and more useful than our current M-Banking service.
“Whilst we have decided to remove our M-Banking service, we are also investing in future enhancements to our mobile banking services that will deliver our customers an even better experience,” it said in the statement.
According to internal numbers I crunched recently with ZenithOptimedia Australia and the major local carriers, iPhones are used by between 8% – 10% of unique mobile phone consumers and business customers. It is interesting that even though phones that use operating systems like Symbian – still the dominant mobile OS in Australia – could only get 0.6% of their internet banking customers to use the Java-app based service.
Personally, I used the service on my Nokia N95 in 2008 before I started using an iPhone (and the mobile web-based banking service). The Java-based app was quick and convenient, but without a touch screen interface it was cumbersome to use. Clearly mobile banking is here to stay, but touch-phone user-experience and smartphone apps are the way of the future.
(Disclosure: my employer is a rostered agency of ANZ competitor NAB)
