RELATIONSHIPS, MOBILITY AND SAVING MONEY

A survey by Allianz Life finds people aren't very good at saving money. It found 30% say they aren't saving any money at all, while 24% are saving some, but not as much as they could. The survey also found plenty of other weaknesses, including: 18% of people don't have a budget; 18% spend more money than they make; 15% are uneducated about financial planning; 12% pay bills late and 10% make minimum credit card payments. Given this, banks might want to create a special program to capture new deposit relationships or deepen existing ones. As with any relationship, it also helps if you know what the other person wants or needs. The same is true for community banks trying to come up with mobile services to offer small business customers, our topic for today. Small business owners tend to take a wait-and-see-approach when it comes to new product offerings. Nonetheless, the opportunity is there, with 90% of small business owners using mobile technology in some fashion, according to a recent study by Bank of the West. The trick is to give customers what they want from mobile banking. Relevant technologies that add efficiency are important, with 58% of small business owners surveyed saying they wish there were more mobile technologies relevant for their business. Enter the opportunity for community banks to create mobile platforms that cater to small business needs. Small business owners see mobile as key to making their lives easier. They're looking for solutions to make certain aspects of their business less time consuming. When the survey asked small business owners about the time-consuming tasks that mobile technology could better address, 33% asked for solutions that could help them with accepting payments from customers; 24% for monitoring financial accounts; 19% said expense reports and 12% indicated making payments to suppliers. When you're thinking about what to offer, this shows it helps to think about efficiency. Consider features that allow small businesses to do payroll management; remote check deposit; card payments; entitlements and cash flow projections. Safety and security are important, as mobile fund transfers increase. Security is important to too a small business owner and they want to know their data is secure. They trust banks, but threats are rising so it is important to keep evolving with them. Security- solution provider McAfee Labs expects threats to mobile devices will become even more of a focus of cybercriminals in the year ahead. Banks can reassure customers by providing top-notch security and staying on top of these threats. As it is, banks have to overcome a significant fear-factor hurdle to get more small businesses to use mobile banking. The survey found even though most small business owners had never experienced information or data theft as a result of using mobile technology, 56% were concerned and that concern had at least somewhat prevented them from implementing it more fully. A recent report by Goode Intelligence gives several actionable steps banks can take to ensure their customers are secure when banking on mobile devices. These include: creating an encrypted communication channel between users and the bank; having multi factor authentication; security testing all mobile banking apps; monitoring iTunes and Google Play frequently for rogue apps that purport to represent their brand; educating customers how to clean out contents when they upgrade their smartphone and dispose of the old one. Before you pour money into a piggy bank or a mobile strategy, be sure you're investing in offerings your small business customers want. Do that and you have already made great strides toward deepening customer relationships.