As previously reported on Bank Innovation, mobile banking is the top area of innovation banks in which are spending money—and it appears to be working, with Chase and Wells Fargo both reporting accelerated growth in mobile users last week, and with Bank of America also reporting strong growth today on the bank’s Q3 2016 earnings call.
According to Bank of America, mobile numbers are up 16% from last year to 21.3 million from about 18.8 million users in 2015. Chase saw growth of 17.1% on the year, while Wells reported annual growth of 17.5%.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan cited its “industry-leading digital banking capabilities” as one of the bank’s strong points, and specifically as a capability that serves to better the experience of the bank’s customers.
The bank also reported that mobile deposits now comprise 18% of total consumer deposits, up from 16% last quarter. This extremely strong growth may be the reason why BofA is the only bank to break out and report this particular statistic.
Bank of America’s total branch count also dropped 2.3% YOY, to 4,629 from 4,741.
Moynihan also cited the bank’s strong investments in innovation, which include investments and experiments with blockchain (specifically with Ripple’s network) as well as other areas of interest for banking.
While BofA did see a solid increase in its mobile numbers, industry experts are already analyzing whether its Q3 really is as strong as reported, with Bank of America stock (its ticker is BAC, in case you forgot) now evidently down 0.25%.
Wells Fargo stock is only down 0.05%–its own Q3 results are leading some to mark its cross-selling crisis—”scandal” get boring after a while—at an end. However, others are pointing out that Stumpf’s replacement also had prior knowledge of the incident, so the bank isn’t quite out of the woods yet.
To learn more about mobile banking join us in Tel Aviv for Bank Innovation Israel this November 1-3. Register here.