| By :
Martin Hofschroer
Banks can improve customer service and reduce call centre costs by offering new text message facilities. Analyst firm Juniper Research found that new types of text alerts are set to treble the number of mobile banking messages to nearly 90 billion a year by 2015, which will result in the average customer receiving a message every two days. Juniper discovered through a series of interviews that banks are looking at how these new process alerts can speed up customer applications for popular products such as loans and mortgages. Report author Howard Wilcox said: "Our research found that messaging is a 'win-win' for banks. "They can improve customer service significantly, whilst simultaneously eliminating the cost of servicing customer enquiries placed with call centres." The Juniper report also revealed that there are some banking businesses who are yet to embrace texting services as only 80 per cent of banks offer some form of mobile banking. Forecasts about the future of mobile banking from the report included the statements that Western Europe will be the region with the highest penetration of users in 2015 and transactional mobile banking will experience similar growth rates to texting. Lloyds TSB announced that it would drop its charges and allow their customers to bank on their mobile phones for free. The high street bank is following in the footsteps of competitors Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays by offering the free service. Jatin Patel, Lloyds TSB personal current accounts director, said: "We are keen to provide our customers with a variety of tools, enabling them to take more control of their finances." Research reported by the Sun newspaper revealed that two-thirds of customers want to bank on their mobiles as the number of people using mobile banking services has increased by 300 per cent over the previous year. An investigation by software and services company Sybase into mobile banking services found that the majority of customers would like to be notified of potentially fraudulent behaviour. Matthew Talbot, vice president mCommerce at Sybase 365 said: "The challenge for businesses in 2010 will be to adapt their mobile offerings to meet this increased demand, and find ways to target their services at specific segments of their customer base." The Sybase study discovered that 75 per cent would like to receive reports of potential credit card fraud, while 69 per cent were interested in balance enquiries and 65 per cent would like to be able to freeze a card.
|
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.articlesbacklink.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
