28/05/2012

By Scott Thompson

One million Westpac personal and business customers now regularly use smartphones to access their accounts. Usage of smartphones on the Australian group’s mobile banking channels has grown by 90 per cent in the last 12 months. Mobile activity now accounts for 30 per cent of all online sessions, growing 150 per cent over the past year.

“Banking is being transformed by the use of technology such as smartphones and these figures prove that this trend is only going to accelerate,” says Jason Yetton, group executive, Westpac Retail & Business Banking. “They also show how popular smartphone apps such as our own are, but the important thing we are finding is that customers want ease of use, fast download speeds, a good range of tasks, reliability and the knowledge that their transactions are secure. These are the key factors to ‘banking on the go’.”

Harry Wendt, Westpac’s general manager of online & mobile, comments: “Not only does this place us at the cutting edge of the banking revolution it also justifies the investment that we have made and continue to improve the experience for our customers. It is one thing to produce mobile apps but it is another altogether to have the systems to support them so that we can guarantee the service that our customers of smartphone banking now demand. We are just at the beginning of this transformation.”