Marketing is essential to grow Mobile Banking

"Consumer Adoption of Mobile-Banking is Lagging Primarily Due To Ineffective Marketing By Many Financial Institutions" is the heading of an article reporting on a recent research report produced by Javelin Strategy and Research (Read here). "Wow!", I thought, this is insightful: it is true that consumers will not use things that they are not told about. This is marketing 101 and is true for every consumer product. Could it be that mobile banking is not reaching its full potential because it is not sold properly? So I decided to read on.

It turns out that the report provides many other interesting observations and is based on the assessment of 26 criteria for a collection of US banks. It seems an accurate observation that banks do not support mobile banking with adequate marketing when a number of banks do not describe the security of their offerings in marketing material. This is important as it is known that security is one of the key inhibitors for consumers to use mobile banking. If banks do not actively address these concerns how could they expect their subscribers to use the service?

While this is a report focused on the US market, it is my experience that this lack of marketing support is more widely spread. Mobile banking seems to be the only consumer product that companies expect to take off without telling their customers about it. This is one of those things that I have difficulty in understanding.