Mobile banking adoption in the U.S. is grew by 20% last quarter according to research we have done on large and regional banks in the U.S.

USAA is a good published example of this industry growth we think is fueled by the proliferation of smartphones and a growing consumer comfort and familiarity with mobile technology.

Nielson: Smartphones to overtake feature phones in 2011

USAA reports having 17% mobile banking adoption at then end of Q1 2010 up from 14% at the end of 2009. Other banks for whom we cannot report numbers grew at a similar rate.

The key question is “When will mobile adoption level off like online banking did?”

Online banking usage has held steady around 40% for years now. So far, most U.S. banks have limited mobile banking to online banking customers. Wells Fargo is the notable exception.

Banks are considering options to support offline customers (non-online banking customers). However, many efforts are unlikely to be live until at least early 2011.

When will mobile adoption level off like online banking did?”

At 20% quarterly growth, mobile banking will catch up with online banking in 2011. Meanwhile Nielsen reports smartphone usage will catch up with feature phone usage in 2011.

Bank of America may be an example of maturing mobile banking. But if so, mature mobile banking isn’t moving much slower than the newcomers.

BofA reports having over 4 million mobile banking users up from 2.6 million reported in June 2009. That addition of 1.4 million users in nine months represents roughly 18% growth per quarter and nearly 54% growth overall.

It’s time to put those offline user support projects into overdrive.

Universities are an under-reported but fascinating segment of mobile commerce. I’ve spent a great deal of time talking to University Advancement and Development groups (aka fundraisers) about mobile technology over the last few months. Here are the results of some research I conducted with MobileFeat, a maker of mobile applications for non-profits. I think these results are interesting to anyone focusing on the twenty-something market segment.

Half of recent graduates have an iPhone

Smartphone distribution among recent graduates

Nearly half (43%) of recent graduates would like a mobile application from their University

Less than a quarter of smartphone users graduating in the last five years have ever donated to their alma mater

The Challenge

Higher Education fundraisers are finding it increasingly difficult to stay in contact with young alumni. Alumni often move around repeatedly in their early careers. Often schools lose touch with many young alumni.

There has long been a correlation between gifts of any size by young people and large gifts to their alma mater later in life. Therefore, it’s imperative to get young people to donate now if schools want major gifts thirty years from now.

Furthermore, even if schools can contact alumni, Caller ID lets alumni simply screen out phone-a-thon campaign calls. With no prompting, one respondent specifically mentioned using Caller ID to avoid university fundraising calls. So phone-a-thon cost-effectiveness is decreasing despite being staffed by unpaid university students.

What we found

Not surprisingly, a strong majority (87%) of respondents carry smartphones. Half of respondents use an iPhone and nearly a fifth (19%) have a Blackberry.

Similarly, three quarters of respondents (75%) said they were interested in staying in touch with their school and in getting campus news, departmental updates, sports scores, etc. Many of these respondents indicated they already use email and social media such as Facebook to stay in touch with former classmates and their alma mater.

When asked directly about also using a free application to stay in touch with their school, nearly half (43%) indicated they would, even though there are few if any such applications in existence today. Presumably interest would be even higher if such applications were already widely available.

Opportunity
Less than a quarter (23%) of smartphone users graduating since 2005 have donated to their alma mater. Participation rates at colleges and universities vary widely among institutions and across fundraising campaigns. However, in my experience this participation rate falls below Annual Fund campaigns for the universities represented.

With over three-quarters not giving, there appears to be an opportunity to increase donations through more consistent communication with alumni. There is a clear interest from alumni to stay in touch with schools through both mobile applications and social media. Mobile appears to be an untapped platform for University Advancement & Development staff to maintain contact with young alumni and generate net-new donations to universities.

Methodology

We interviewed recent graduates from around the U.S. in late October and early November 2009. Universities represented include UC Davis, Penn State, Elon, Dartmouth, and Purdue. Graduation dates ranged from 2005 through 2009.

Contact me if you would like to conduct more detailed research on this or other mobile topics.

This morning I received some interesting statistics in my email inbox. Many of you might have received it as well. I reposted it here.

iPhone consistently covers 2/3 of mobile users

The first thing I noticed was how consistently iPhone usage is measured at around 66% of mobile usage to a given site. This is what I’ve seen in my experience with a number of organizations. I’ve also seen this stat elsewhere. It’s easy to understand why companies with a tight budget pick the iPhone when forced to pick one mobile platform.

Smartphone almost as happy with their browser as computer users

Secondly, I was surprised to find that smartphone users (68%) were almost as satisfied with using their browser on their phone as computer users (70%).  Not surprisingly, feature phone users felt differently (47%).

Coincidentally, Adam Woozeer (@AdamWoozeer) tweeted yesterday that “About 58% of total #IPhone users primarily use the iphone for web.” I’m haven’t been able to verify his data, but it seems to fit with the Chitika data. I might have ignored each of these data points individually, but together they made me take note.

Personally, I use my iPhone browser extensively, but I wouldn’t call it my “primary browser.” I certainly don’t interact with web sites in the same way on my iPhone as I do on my computer. Despite all the power of the iPhone browser, I tend to do everything mobile in task-oriented, bite-sized chunks. For me, this is as true for applications as it is when browsing web sites. In fact, web site loading is often just slow enough that I abandon the site all together rather than wait (I use the original iPhone without 3G).

Smartphone click through rates much lower than computer users

This is almost heresy. The conventional wisdom in mobile advertising is that mobile has much higher click through rates than computers (e.g. mobile ads are more valuable), although the tide may be turning. Chitika found the opposite. Chitika found that smartphone mobile advertising click through rates (0.48%) are much less than online click through rates (0.83%).

The much lower mobile click through rate for mobile makes sense given the impatient, bite-sized behavior mobile consumers display. The stratospherical and often unsubstantiated click through rates quoted by mobile vendors with a vested interest (see link above) may not hold up in less controlled circumstances with larger sample sizes.

Maybe Monetization isn’t all about ecommerce-style advertising…

According to the stats above, smartphone users essentially consider their phone browser as good as a computer browser, yet they are far less responsive to traditional advertising.

Ultimately the lower click through rate suggests that ecommerce-style mobile advertising isn’t the best way to monetize mobile. The mobile context is just different. Mobile requires a different approach than ecommerce.

And from this point there aren’t easy, tested answers to the right way to proceed. It all depends.

Best practices will arise. But for now success relies upon knowing what others have tried and the history of what-works-where and what-doesn’t. Mobile monetization should also include actual commerce, which ironically most mcommerce lacks. Product placement and transactional revenue models also are appearing to work well in certain contexts.

Resources are tight and the stakes are high. This is no time to wander into the wilderness alone.

We would love to be your sherpa. Drop us a line: info@MobileStrategyPartners.com.