Banks are on the move to support more mobile financial transactions in the New Year, say local banking officials.
 
“One thing we’re seeing is customers using different platforms to do more mobile and online banking,” said Chris George, PNC Bank’s Wilmington-based senior vice president and regional manager.
 
Bill Bunn, director of retail and mortgage banking for Charlotte-based Park Sterling Bank, confirmed that his bank is seeing the same trend.
 
“Consumers continue to use mobile [applications] at a more rapid pace of adoption as well as for different types of uses,” he said. “It’s for more than just checking an account balance. It’s for bill pay and money transfers.”
 
There is an increasing focus on creating an integrated suite of applications for mobile devices as opposed to desktop computers, Bunn added.
 
That transition was reflected in the 2015 Black Friday sales numbers, which showed that more online shopping traffic came from mobile devices than from desktops, according to the IBM Watson Trend Hub. PNC, which participates in Apple Pay, just rolled out Samsung Pay and Android Pay programs as well, George said, adding that the applications are more secure than credit card transactions at point-of-sale locations because the data is transmitted directly from device to device.
 
“Your card information is on your smartphone, and it converts that account information [into data] that can be read by the POS machine. It creates a different one-time account, and that information is not shared with the merchant,” he said.
 
Park Sterling finds that, along with its bill pay offerings, its check deposit- by-phone service is becoming increasingly popular with its retail customers.
 
The customer takes a photo of the front and back of an endorsed check with a smartphone and then submits it for deposit using Park Sterling’s app, Bunn said.
 
“We advise people to hold onto the paper check for a few days to make sure the deposit went through, but then they can discard the paper,” he said.
 
Checks may increasingly be a thing of the past as more smartphone owners are able to make even casual money transfers using a mobile banking app.
 
“We call it Pop Money; each bank has its own name,” George said, explaining that a customer can turn a smartphone or tablet into a money pipeline to send funds to another person using that person’s mobile phone number or email address.
 
The recipient gets an alert asking them to confirm receipt of the message and the app then takes them through a series of steps to deposit the money in their account.
 
The process works even if the two individuals involved do not use the same bank.
 
Person-to-person payments via mobile device are “absolutely another area of growth,” said Bunn, adding that Park Sterling is developing such an app for its customers.
 
Seeing the success of its mobile services for individuals, Park Sterling has launched mobile banking platforms aimed at businesses. It recently rolled out a small business mobile banking app based on the personal app that is as simple and easy to use as the individual one, Bunn said.
 
The bank also launched what it calls its Treasury Management Platform designed for medium-sized businesses with more complex needs, giving those companies the ability to do their banking from mobile devices as well.