A recent study on investors’ usage of digital channels to interact with their financial institutions reveals some surprising and some not-so-surprising findings.
In “Financial attention through multiple digital channels,” Vanguard studied their clients’ use of digital channels – desktop or laptop computers, mobile phone and mobile apps – over a three-year period (January 2015 to December 2017) to gain insight on the strategic questions facing designers of digital experiences at financial institutions. The sample consisted of 18,360 tenured investors – both retail and DC investors – with a median age of 53, median Vanguard assets of $84,000 and median tenure of 14 years as Vanguard investors.
Not surprisingly, the desktop browser was still the most popular digital channel, but mobile usage is growing rapidly. And while mobile usage currently appears to complement desktop usage, it could emerge in the future as a substitute for the desktop channel, the study notes.
Among so-called “attentive investors” who logged in at least once over the study period, more than 95% used a desktop browser, while only 4 in 10 used a mobile device. An app was even less popular, with only 2 in 10 investors logging on through the app.
Vanguard notes that usage patterns in general were similar for both retail and DC-only subsamples, but DC-only investors were more likely to have accessed their account through a mobile browser. Among retail investors, 87% of total time was spent on the desktop channel versus 78% for DC-only investors; they spent the remaining 22% of time on either a mobile app or mobile browser.
Meanwhile, only 1 in 10 investors accessed their accounts through all three channels, while only a fraction of investors (less than 5%) relied on mobile access exclusively.
A Move to Mobile
Vanguard notes that the growth rates of mobile were even more striking among the DC-only investors, where the fraction of attentive days with mobile access increased from 18 in 2015 to 30 by the end of the study in 2017.
The growth rates of both the app and mobile browser usage were more than 12% yearly. During that same period, desktop usage declined by 5% yearly among DC-only investors, the study notes.
Over the long term, the authors anticipate that investors will be drawn increasingly to the convenience of mobile devices, as consumers generally have in shopping, news gathering and social media. In addition, while the preference for mobile access typically has been associated with younger users, this “will become more pervasive among all investors with the simple passage of time.”
Clickstream data for DC-only accounts suggest that most of those logging on had similar intentions regardless of channel choice. Vanguard explains that a ranking of the five most popular activities by channel among DC-only clients shows great consistency across the three channels, although rankings differed slightly. For example, “evaluate my progress” and “get the details of a specific transaction” were the top two out of five entries for a desktop browser but they were in the bottom two for a mobile app. For DC participants using a mobile browser, “viewing loan details and outstanding balance” was uniquely popular among the channels.
Gender differences also were more pronounced, particularly in terms of the likelihood of mobile use. Among both retail and DC-only investors, men were 6% more likely to have logged on via a mobile device than women. Moreover, men spent nearly 40% more time on mobile devices than women each year.
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