Bank-to-customer mobile messaging rates set to treble - Juniper

New types of SMS mobile banking alerts will help to treble the volume of mobile banking messages to almost 90 billion per annum by 2015, equating to one message every two days for every mobile banking user, according to a new study by Juniper Research.

The research house says moves by banks and vendors to expand the range of mobile banking messaging beyond alert functionality to encompass product and account application updates will boost bank-to-customer SMS volumes significantly.

Juniper analyst Howard Wilcox says: "Our research found that messaging is a 'win-win' for banks. They can improve customer service significantly, whilst simultaneously eliminating the cost of servicing customer enquiries placed with call centres."

Channels

Retail banking

Keywords

Mobile & online banking

Comments: (1)

David Divitt - VocaLink - London 17 August, 2010, 11:25

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I can see why Juniper would refer to this as a win-win situation by improving dialogue between banks and the customers, but reading this story actually causes me a few concerns. Communication is essential but it must be managed properly.

If customers are receiving an SMS message every two days from their bank then it risks turning into 'white noise', just there in the background and consumers will stop noticing it. When banks are using tools such as SMS to communicate with their customers for areas such as fraud prevention, for example, it is important that customers read and respond to messages immediately, especially if they are being told of a transaction on their account that is fraudulent.

With the way technology is evolving, surely it won't be long until you can auto-file SMS messages in the same way that many email systems allow you to do today - and if customers are inundated by messages from their banks will they stop reading them all? I would caution banks in overuse of any communication tool, and instead communicate in the way that best suits the needs of that particular message - be in email, SMS, phone or even good old Royal Mail.