20bn Online Payments To Be Made In UK This Year

Paying the gas bill at the Post Office is becoming an after thought for many UK consumers after new figures showed over 20 billion bill payments will be made using a PC or mobile device by the end of 2014.

Juniper Research reports that bill payments made using a PC, mobile or tablet will top that number and the UK alone is set to account for around 16 per cent of the global consumer household bill total.

“Customers, particularly those of Gen Y, are attracted to banks that offer innovative and exciting new services. Banks are eager to capture these customers early and achieve ‘lock-in’. The ability to offer cutting edge banking applications and services is also a way for banks to secure customer loyalty and increase customer satisfaction,” noted Nitin Bhas, author of the Mobile & Online Banking: Developed & Developing Market Strategies 2014-2019 report.

The trend for making payments by using new and emerging technologies is due to the growing number of consumers that are accepting the world of digital banking and the fact that it’s far from the minefield it was once perceived to be.

There’s an interesting split across the different classes of devices as PC and tablet users saw the highest value transactions whereas mobile users are the higher adopters of bill payment and presentment services.

Having a large screen to bank on is still an important attraction for consumers that are far more likely to trust it when it comes to security and verification for bill payments that can sometimes only be done on large screen devices.

Financial institutions are also already laying the groundwork for wearables and a Juniper white paper looking at the future of mobile banking states the new class of device has the “capability of bringing contextual information together in a highly convenient and personal manner”.

Although the uptake of mobile banking is on the up there still are plenty of instances where systems go down for hours on end and consumers will still be slightly sceptical whilst this remains an issue.

Image Credit: Flickr (Diamond Geyser)