Most Consumers Expect Digital Banking to Be Personal Banking

Thanks to the acceleration of digital interactions during the pandemic, consumers now expect more than half of their banking business — 61% — to be digital-only by 2024.

But that still leaves another 39% of banking they expect will involve direct human assistance. Even as banks see an increase in customers relying solely on ATMs and mobile channels at the expense of access physical branches and drive up tellers, branches won’t entirely vanish from customer expectations.

Baby boomers still do a bulk of their banking at brick-and-mortar branches, and even Generation Z consumers will at least sometimes visit branches to do their banking.

For banking customers 65 and older, it’s not just a matter of avoiding digital-only banking because they’re set in their ways.

The greatest deterrents to digital-only banking vary by age group, though some concerns transcend generational differences: roughly 20% to 30% of baby boomers and seniors, Generation X consumers and millennials listed concerns about data security and fraud as their reason for not going digital-only with their banking.

Fostering personal relationships with customers across all channels will be key to any successful omnichannel strategy. This is especially important given the rise of banking choices consumers now have thanks to digital channels. As part of this relationship building, financial institutions (FI) will need to focus more on making sure they are each customer’s primary FI instead of on attracting more overall deposits.

Meanwhile, 62% of consumers say mobile banking apps have become indispensable to them, up 7% in 2021 compared to 2020, and 73% of respondents said they now use their mobile banking app at least weekly.

The rise of mobile banking apps for financial management crosses generational barriers, with every age group saying that their mobile banking app use has increased.

One interesting crossover in use has been an increase in consumers booking travel through their FI digital platforms, with 13% saying they had booked trips through either a bank website or mobile app. In addition, 34% of those who have not booked travel through their FI said they would consider choosing that option in the future, and almost three-quarters of those who have done so say they were likely to do it again.

To learn more about how banks are making their services more accessible in the wake of the pandemic, download the latest Digital-First Banking Tracker, a collaboration between PYMNTS and NCR Corp.