Even with a surge in consumer confidence in electronic banking, a recent BMI-TechKnowledge report shows that bank branches are here to stay.
The report on multi-channel banking for retail financial services used over 800 interviews conducted in Gauteng to establish current and future usage for each banking delivery channel, banking patterns and levels of comfort and confidence with each delivery channel.
"In 1998, we were looking at 45% confidence in electronic banking, but in 2003, there is now a resounding 85% confidence from the business sector, which I attribute back to the marketing and PR that banks have done to reassure businesses and consumers," says Althea Bacchialoni, principal analyst on the report.
The channels that were tested included branch banking, telephone banking, ATM banking, Internet banking, mobile banking and the use of non-banking providers such as Pick `n Pay.
Despite this level of confidence, upper, middle and lower income groups tend to have an 85% to 89% usage of their branches, while small to medium businesses have almost a day to day need to conduct business banking with their branch and reflect a 98% branch banking usage.
"You now have a dichotomy between what customers want from the banks and what they want as a technical offering," says Bacchialoni. "Banking branches are here to stay, because no matter how confident they become in technology, they will always want to speak to a representative of the bank in certain situations."
The student or youth category has an aversion to branch banking (no need yet to go into a branch on a regular basis) and the lowest usage at 58%. For the pensioner, this is often a social occasion and there is a 100% usage pattern for branch banking.
"There is now a process of choice for the retail-banking customer; which delivery channel to use and for which banking transaction?" says Bacchialoni. "Thus one of the key areas of research was to establish which channels were being used, the reasons for this usage, how often and for which banking transactions."
Bearing in mind that the sample base was concentrated in Gauteng, there was still a high number of retail banking customers who consider themselves to be a "traditionalist" in terms of using technology for their banking service (49%). A low 16% rated themselves as "cyber-savvy" with the rest falling somewhere in between. Men were more confident than women in this arena, with 23% as opposed to women`s 12% rating themselves as cyber-savvy.
The research was carried out in July, prior to the number of banking security incidents, but Bacchialoni feels these will not have affected overall confidence in online banking services. "From 15 years` experience in the field, I can say that people are not going to change their accounts because banks have acted pretty quickly and put in extra layers of security," she says. "The consumer and the business sectors have extremely high levels of confidence, I would say 80% and above, in terms of security."
BMI-T may do a follow up "dipstick approach" survey to glean how confidence has been affected by the recent identity fraud incidents.
Share
