The Impact of Mobile Channel Adoption on Customer Omni-Channel Banking Behavior

As smartphones and tablets have been widely adopted and mobile banking apps have come into ubiquitous use, mobile devices have increasingly become new tools that customers use for banking, payments, budgeting, and shopping. This paper examines the impact of the mobile channel on customer service demand across banking digital channels, and investigates how the use of the mobile channel influences customer financial decision-making. Our analysis is validated based on a novel large-scale dataset that contains 43 million individual transactions from 190,000 customers during April to June 2013 from a financial institution in the United States. Our findings suggest that: (1) the use of the mobile channel increases customer demand for digital services; (2) lower ATM density and higher branch channel density in the customers' vicinity is associated with higher digital service demand; (3) the mobile phone channel serves as a complement to the PC channel, the tablet channel substitutes for the PC channel, and the mobile phone channel and the tablet channel complement one another; (4) customers acquire more information for financial decision-making following the use of the mobile channel, and mobile phone and tablet users are less likely to incur overdraft and credit card penalty fees. Net benefit of the mobile channel to the bank is $0.07 USD per month per (average) customer. This study has implications for banks' managers related to the design and management of service delivery channels, and for financial regulators related to the inclusiveness of financial system