Telecom Lead India: The number of mobile banking users worldwide reached 300 million with adoption of the service in developed countries growing significantly.
Mobile networks now cover between 85-90 percent of the world’s population. The number of mobile phones in use around the world in 2011 reached six billion.
Mobile banking has changed traditional methods of banking and its usage has improved not only in developed countries, but also in developing countries as well. Banks and mobile carriers are moving towards more sophisticated techniques of marketing as a result of security and user-friendly concerns.
To enhance their marketing, banks and mobile carriers are using IT technology for ensuring security and user friendliness. Mobile banking is not only used for basic transactions of online banking, such as checking balances, viewing recent transactions, paying bills and transferring funds but also for marketing of the various products and services offered by banks.
Mobile financial service adoption by consumers will grow significantly during the next few years, exceeding the use of online banking by 2015. By offering mobile financial services, banks can reasonably expect to increase their sales by as much as 60 percent, while research has shown that implementation of such technology can reduce the cost of acquiring a new customer by 20 percent due to increased effectiveness of mobile-related customer acquisition marketing, according to Global Information Inc.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s number of mobile banking accounts has reached at 1.45 million, experiencing a growth of 37 percent during the quarter ending June 30, 2012.
Accounts activity level has also improved substantially during the second quarter (April-June) 2012 as the number of active accounts increased by 66 percent.
Females, running small businesses such as beauty parlor, boutiques, and grocery stores have showed interest in opening Level 3 accounts to act as BB agents, according to a report in Dawn.
Pakistan has 119,860,799 mobile phone consumers in the country, including 36,048,127 of Mobilink.
