PREMIUM – Digital channels will play a larger role in increasing Bank of America’s deposit growth, a key part of the bank’s business strategy. Currently, 26% of BofA’s sales come from its digital front, but according to Dean Athanasia, president of consumer & small business at BofA, the goal is to drive that number up to 50% over the next 18 months.

For this to happen, the bank has and will continue to steadily invest in its digital platform, Athanasia said, yesterday at Morgan Stanley’s Financial Conference in New York. In the past year alone, it launched an online mortgage platform, digital auto loans, rolled out its AI-driven virtual assistant Erica, which just crossed one million users, as well as launched a roboadviser called Merrill Edge.

“Everything that you can do physically in our organization, you can do on the digital platform or via phone,” Athanasia said, at the Morgan Stanley conference.

Just how important is the smartphone to BofA? In the words of Athanasia:

If you pulled out your phone, the volume going through here whether — we advise transact, pay, borrow, invest, this to us is worth, 1,300 financial centers in the old bank.

In terms of how well each of these initiatives are performing, Athanasia said, the bank currently has 500 million logins on its mobile app, and 35.5 million digital users, of which 25 million are active mobile users. With its P2P service through Zelle, which BofA launched less than a year ago, Athanasia said, it is “already twice the size of Venmo,” in terms of the payment volume. He also said that Bank of America makes up for 25% of total volume throughout Zelle’s entire network of 100 banks and FIs.

For its digital mortgage platform, launched earlier this year, about 13% of its mortgage applications come from its digital platform, Athanasia said. And that number is expected to rise over time.

In terms of growing deposits, Bank of America added features like booking an appointment on its mobile app a few months ago. The bank now sees 1.5 million digital appointments through this feature. Over the course of the year, the bank will invest in similar features that make it easier for existing customers to open accounts via digital channels, but it will also invest in initiates that makes it easier for new customers to open deposit accounts either through a digital channel or a high-tech branch, which Athanasia refers to as advanced centers without people.

Bank of America currently has $674 billion in deposits as of June 12, according to Athanasia.