Bank Earnings Show Consumers’ Increased Use of Digital Channels

Earnings season has just gotten underway.

And amid the slew of bank reports on Friday (Oct. 14) – the trinity of JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — a few data points show unabated trends among the questions and the commentary on consumer spending.

A highlight: The continued move towards doing all manner of banking online.

Commentary on the earnings calls, at least thus far, has been somewhat general. Each of the CEOs from these banks stated that technology investments still are on the roadmap. It is in the earnings supplementals that we can see that the headcount of digitally active consumers, and those using mobile conduits, are on the rise.

In the commentary on the Citigroup call, management stated that 2% of the 8% expense growth seen year on year was related to tech investment, with an emphasis on consolidating tech platforms.

Growth in Digital Overall and Mobile Channels Too

The Citigroup supplementals show that active mobile users gained 12% year over year to 17 million, as part of the overall 24 million digital users, which in turn was up 8% year on year. Citi wasn’t the only bank that made gains in digital users.

Per commentary from CEO Charlie Scharf, during the quarter, Wells Fargo initiated a branded digital experience. “In the third quarter, we continued to launch new APIs, providing our commercial and corporate clients more flexibility and helping them drive efficiencies. For example, we launched a new real-time payment API allowing clients to send digital requests to a payer that can be approved to easily send a real-time credit transfer,” said Scharf.

To that end, the company noted in its own filings that its mobile active customers stood at 28.3 million, gaining 5% from last year. Total digitally active customers were 3% higher in the same timeframe, to 33.6 million.

As for JPMorgan, CEO Jamie Dimon noted that tech-focused investments remained “on track,” and the supplementals show that active mobile customers surged by 10% to 48.9 million; active digital customers were 7% higher year on year to just under 62 million.

The numbers above dovetail with PYMNTS’ research into the Connected Economy, which show — across the globe — that digital banking holds appeal to consumers pretty much everywhere. Data shows 59% of consumers across 11 countries engage in digital banking activities. Singapore, Spain and the U.K. are standouts on the international stage, as detailed in “Benchmarking the World’s Digital Transformation, The ConnectedEconomy.” We wrote in that report that the “availability of attractive mobile banking alternatives to brick-and-mortar banking — coupled with the widespread availability of smartphones — drives both adoption and usage.”