Mobile Banking Continues to Accelerate

Mobile banking is in the Early Majority phase. That's nice!

A post from mFoundry Blog by Drew Sievers has the whole story. Here is a part:

Rapid Growth
There are two ways to evaluate the success of mobile banking: the number of financial institutions offering the service, and/or the number of customers using the offering. A combination of absolute growth numbers and velocity can give you a decent view into the market health.
Users
At mFoundry, we’ve been watching user adoption increase by double digit percentage points every month, meaning that we’re looking at wicked fast year-over-year growth. Are we unusual in this regard? Of course I’d like to think that we’re something special, but there is evidence from a variety of other sources that the mobile banking market is humming along quite nicely. In fact, a recent survey from comScore shows that mobile financial account users surged by 54% to 30 million Americans in the past year. Most of the growth is, not surprisingly, from the app space, which provides the most secure, easiest mode for accessing your financial data.
Financial Institutions
When we look across the industry, we estimate there are roughly 1,200 to 1,500 financial institutions with mobile banking services deployed or in development. Out of the approximately 14,000 banks, credit unions, and trusts in the United States, that’s pretty good penetration for a relatively new channel technology. Perhaps more telling, however, is the velocity behind current sales. Last year, mFoundry and our partners added a total of 200 new financial institution clients at a rate of about 3 or so a week. In 2011, however, we are seeing the rate increase dramatically to the signing of one new client per day. This blistering hot pace is actually accelerating as we see more and more financial institutions looking to deploy mobile banking solutions.
What does all this mean? It means that we’ve entered the best part of the adoption curve. At the risk of getting overly academic, consider the typical path for new technology adoption:
Go back to 2006 and we’ve got the Innovators section where large banks like Citi, Bank of America and others began to experiment with mobile banking. Then, from 2008-2010, we picked up a nice chunk of Early Adopters including banks like First Tennessee, Zions, BB&T and others. It was last year, however, that we crossed the chasm from an experimental technology to a full-fledged ROI-generating channel. At this point, we moved into the area we occupy today called the Early Majority, where literally thousands of financial institutions will sign up for mobile banking. This is the sweet spot for the industry where only the slowest moving, most technically challenged banks and credit unions, won’t begin to take advantage of mobility.
So, is 2011 going to be the year mobile banking goes mainstream? I’d say it already is and if you haven’t moved then you’re already behind.