The meteoric growth of smartphone and tablet adoption and the highly touted Apple Watch rollout are a tip-off to financial institutions: Push notifications will be central to consumers’ lives sooner than many expect. Javelin forecasts that alerts will reach a milestone within five years: More than half of online consumers will receive financial alerts by 2019. The increasing popularity of mobile banking apps will fuel the growth, and notifications will supplant text alerts as the No. 2 form of alert. Big obstacles remain, however. For starters, banking notifications must find a way to stand out amid the flurry of notifications from social media, utility apps like calendars, games, and so forth. But Javelin’s comparison of mobile banking apps from Bank of America, Chase, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and a regional credit union underscores that FIs are also hobbling their own cause with off-putting designs.

Primary Questions:

• Who is using alerts today?
• What are the adoption trends for the future?
• Where do push notifications fit in?
• Can FI notifications stand out amid the notifications from all the other apps consumers use?
• What design flaws make it difficult for consumers to find and set notifications on mobile banking apps?

Companies Mentioned:

Press Release: Banking Notifications Must Differentiate from Growing Clutter of Nonbank Apps

The consumer data in this report is based primarily on information collected in a random-sample panel of 8,552 consumers in a November 2014 online survey.