Millennials Use Mobile Banking More (But Trust It Less)
While millennials remain the top adopters of mobile banking, the generation is also more likely to have problems with their financial apps, a new survey released by online mobile payment and identity verification company Jumio found.
While baby boomers have reached the same level of adoption as millennials at least when it comes to online banking—about 77% of both generations are now banking online, the survey of 2,000 U.S. adults found—millennials are less trusting of online services than other generations, Jumio’s 2017 Banking Across Generations Study found.
Only 25% of millennial users surveyed reported that they had “no concerns” with mobile banking, compared with 33% of baby boomers, despite reporting a monthly usage twice as high as the latter generation.
Of the areas millennials were particularly concerned about, “ease of use” was a top area, with 53% of users stating they had strong issues with their mobile banking app in that field. Additionally, 28% of millennial participants stated their concern regarding hidden fees, for both mobile and online banking services.
The top concern for millennial users, however, was security, with 67% of “young” millennials (those born from 1992 onward) and 58% of “older” millennials (those born between 1980-1992) stating that this was their main area of worry when using a mobile banking app.
While millennials expressed the most worry, baby boomers and Gen X also had security fears, with 63% and 57%, respectively, agreeing that security was a field to watch.
Despite the lack of trust, however, millennials remain key to mobile bank usage, Jumio found, with 40% of those who opened new bank accounts in the last year falling into that generation. (Perhaps because of their lack of trust, millennials were also the generation most prone to abandoning their mobile banking activities).
The most common reason for leaving mobile banking was time constraints, the study found, with 36% of those surveyed stating that the process of signing or using the bank account took too long.
Download the full study here.
