While the traditional core group of digital banking channel adopters is biased towards male South Africans, statistics from SA's core banks reveal IT in banking is being taken up by both contingents, virtually equally.
SA's biggest bank by customer number, Absa, says it has seen the “gender gap” in the adoption of digital banking narrowing, according to the Absa Digital Banking unit's latest analysis of customer behaviour.
Arrie Rautenbach, Absa's head of retail markets, says the fact that women are “slowly closing the gap” on digital banking has positive implications for broader financial inclusion and the development of women from an economic perspective.
“Our current digital base consists of a slightly off-balanced split of 53% male and 47% female customers, suggesting that women are trailing men in electronic-banking adoption.” Absa has about 1.2 million and 3.7 million Internet and cellphone banking customers respectively.
Rautenbach says cellphone banking is among the most popular banking channels being used by female customers. “Absa's domestic money transfer service, CashSend, and the bank's SMS alert service, NotifyMe, have also proven to be extremely successful with the bank's female cellphone banking customers.” He says recent cellphone banking innovations will continue to drive migration to this channel.
While others argue that men are more likely to use electronic banking channels than women, says Rautenbach, some insights from a recent Capgemini “Digital Shopper Relevancy” research report found that digitally-savvy women enthusiastically embrace digital communication. The survey found that women turn out to be more active users of digital tools than men - suggesting greater appetite among women to be more transacting savvy.
Gender balance
Fellow big four bank, Standard Bank, says the adoption of digital banking channels appears to be unrelated to gender. Itumeleng Monale, head of self-service and payment innovation at Standard Bank, says the bank has a close to 50-50 split of male and female users of its most popular digital channel, cellphone banking. In fact, she says, there are slightly more female than male users of the channel.
“Mobile banking remains our most popular digital banking channel across all users, and Standard Bank has seen a quadrupling of mobile banking use for the first two quarters of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011. Trends in Internet banking use also reflect consistent growth. Access to, and use of banking channels appear to be unrelated to gender, with bank customers in general requiring greater flexibility in the way they manage their money.”
Similarly, First National Bank (FNB) says its user demographics in general balance the scales. “The app user demographic shows that 51% of users are male and 49% are female, with the majority (57.5%) of users aged between 26 and 34 years.”
Head of FNB Connect ISP, Farren Roper, says there has, however, been a shift of user demographic when it comes to age. “We have seen that user demographic behaviour has begun to shift, with the largest proportion of users being 25 to 36. In our 36 and older base we have seen the amount grow to 30.5%, dispelling the myth that apps and smartphones are for the youth only.”
World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says the latest Mobility report shows that most features are - on the whole - not gender-based, but reflect broadly similar patterns of use between males and females.
“Surprisingly, a significant differentiation in use of mobile money is found according to gender, with males more likely than females to use FNB eWallet and females more likely than males to use Absa CashSend. MTN Mobile Money is also more likely to be used by females than males.”
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