Bank of America: Client Interaction Now Mostly Digital

The majority of Bank of America’s (BoA) client-facing business now takes place through its digital channels, the bank has announced.

The US banking giant has revealed that 85% of all deposit transactions are made by clients using the Bank of America app, ATMs and other automated channels.

In the second quarter alone, nearly 48 million checks were deposited digitally with the bank. During this period a record 871,000 appointments were scheduled with financial specialists using digital channels.

As such, from July over 70% of the bank’s clients were using digital channels for their needs.

This included 4.4 million clients engaging digitally with Life Plan, an automated budgeting and planning app that launched at the end of 2020, making this the bank’s most rapidly adopted feature to date.

This trend has also crossed over to the bank’s business clients: digital now makes up 25% of small business sales, a 19% surge from the previous year.

“We are delivering the best financial technology to help make our clients’ financial lives better,” said David Tyrie, head of digital at Bank of America. “To elevate each client’s digital journey across their entire relationship with us, we focus on their unique needs and aspirations so that we can deliver individualized digital experiences.”

Digitization has become an increasingly prevalent trend in banking, with the Covid-19 pandemic encouraging more people to interact with banks digitally last year.

In 2019, half of US banking customers said they had digitally engaged with their bank either infrequently or not at all. This has since accelerated, and McKinsey & Company now anticipates a 20% increase in this behavior as a result.

According to advisory firm Strategic Resource Management (SRM), financial institutions have to react to this trend with evidence digitization is here to stay post-pandemic.

This includes the use of virtual assistants, which is continuing to gain traction. SRM has found, on average, that one in five people prefer to use Alexa or Google Home devices over an app for online banking.