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Mobile-wallet payments still account for less than 1% of Bank of America Corp.’s credit and debit card charge volume, but they are growing fast, as are mobile deposits, the nation’s second-largest bank reported Thursday.
BofA’s mega-bank rivals JPMorgan Chase & Co. & Wells Fargo and Co. also reported growth in mobile banking.
BofA chairman and chief executive Brian Moynihan told analysts at the company’s first-quarter earnings conference call that the bank now has 19.6 mobile-banking users, up almost 15% from 17.1 million a year ago. Many of these users are enrolling their BofA credit and debit cards into mobile wallets—100,000 in the past week alone, Moynihan said.
“The payment usage was up 3% week over week, so you see this phenomenal growth rate,” he said, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript service.
Still, payments from mobile wallets represent only 0.2% of total card payments at BofA, “so you still have lots of opportunity to convert activity to a platform which is more convenient for the customer,” Moynihan said. Online and mobile payments combined now account 20% of BofA’s card spend and are growing at about 15% annually, more than three times the card portfolio’s overall growth rate.
In its financial report, BofA said it had total card purchase volume of $120.3 billion in the first quarter, up 2.8% from $117.1 billion a year earlier. Debit card volume came in at $69.1 billion, up 3.4%, while credit card volume grew 1.9% to $51.2 billion.
BofA also said that deposits from mobile devices now account for 16% of all deposits, up from 13% in 2015’s first quarter.
New York City-based JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, on Wednesday reported having 23.8 million active mobile-banking customers, up 19% from 20 million a year earlier. The owner of the Chase Paymentech merchant-acquiring operation also reported that it handled $247.5 billion in merchant-processing volume in the first quarter, up 12% from a year earlier. Processed transactions grew 14% to 11.2 billion.
On Thursday, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo reported having 17.7 million mobile-banking customers, an increase of nearly 19% from 14.9 million in 2015’s first quarter. The bank also said first-quarter credit card purchase volume grew 13% year over year to $17.5 billion. Debit card purchases grew 9% to $72 billion.
