Bank Of America Sees 2M Mobile Banking Customer Growth

Showing its own strength in a growing trend among banks, Bank of America’s first-quarter earnings showed that its mobile banking customer base is seeing strong growth.

In fact, the number of mobile banking customers jumped 13 percent from last year’s Q1 to just under 17 million users. Mobile now accounts for 13 percent of all consumer deposit transactions, which is a 3 percent increase on a year-to-year basis. Tailoring its growth strategy toward the mobile customer aligns with one goal of BoA.

“We have added new financial centers in areas of opportunity and we continue to invest in products and innovation, as well as efficiency,” said CEO Brian Moynihan during the company’s call with analysts April 15. “A simple example — in our Consumer Mobile Banking space, we now have 70 million mobile banking customers up over 2 million from last year.”

But like other banks are seeing, with more customers going online for their banking needs, Bank of America is evaluating its physical banking needs as more consumers go digital.

“We continue to reduce our financial centers in the associated cost driven by consumer behavior patterns shifting to more digital,” CFO Bruce Thompson said during the same call.

In Bank of America’s earning press release, the company shared more about how the growth in mobile banking and self-service customer touch points is changing the banking ecosystem.

“The company continued to refine its retail footprint and has closed or divested 287 locations and added 27 locations since the first quarter of 2014, resulting in a total of 4,835 financial centers at the end of the first quarter of 2015,” according to the release.

On the card side, card issuance also jumped 13 percent. BoA issued 1.2 million new credit cards in Q1, which is up by 200,000 from Q1 in 2014. Of its credit cards issued in the quarter, roughly 34 percent were from new customers and 66 percent of those were from existing customers.

In terms of earnings figures, BoA reported a $1.3 billion revenue decline, year over year, but saw a profit of $3.4 billion for its Q1, which was a stark increase from last year’s Q1 loss of $276 million.

“We see continued encouraging signs in customer and client activity, with consumer spending increasing and utilization of credit by our commercial customers rising. This should bode well for the near-term economic outlook,” Moynihan wrote in the company’s earnings statement.