2021 Digital Banking Trends

By Allison Beer, Head of Digital, Chase
December 20, 2020

In 2020, COVID-19 accelerated consumer adoption of digital banking as social distancing measures took effect across the country. Our customers increasingly used Chase.com or the Chase Mobile app to manage their finances, pay bills or send money to friends and family. In Q3 2020, we had nearly 55 million digitally active customers¹, up 6% YOY, and over 40 million mobile active customers², up 10% YoY. ³

How did digital banking change in 2020?

• We saw some interesting demographic trends related to digital banking adoption. It wasn’t just our younger customers who became more digitally active, but also those over 50 who now account for half of our new digitally active customers.
• As the federal government passed stimulus bills to address the economic impact of the virus, we saw more and more customers use Chase QuickDeposit to deposit checks using their mobile phone. This deposit method now represents more than 40% of all check deposits versus 30% pre-COVID.
• Demand for mortgages remained strong thanks to low interest rates and greater demand for housing in the suburbs as people looked for more room at home and in their backyards. More than half of mortgage applications were completed digitally in Q3 2020, twice the level of Q1. 

Which digital banking trends will become more prevalent in 2021?

Based on early data, we expect digital banking adoption to continue to become even more popular in the new year. The following trends will help banks create deeper engagement and fuel new adoption of their digital banking offerings:  

Personalization

Beyond their account or credit card balances, consumers increasingly want access to information about their finances that can help them make more informed decisions about their money and financial goals. One popular feature in our mobile app is Snapshot, an easy-to-digest daily overview of a customer’s transactions and personalized financial trends. It uses advanced algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide customers with meaningful insights about their spending and saving.

Personalization efforts will also drive deeper engagement between customers and other digital banking features or products by providing them with contextually relevant actions to take. On pay day for example, customers are given the option to pay bills or create an Autosave rule to reach a savings goal in just a few clicks within the Chase Mobile app. 

Automation

You’ve probably heard the expression “set it and forget it” during a late-night infomercial for a kitchen appliance, and the same now applies to certain digital banking features. Customers want convenience and banks want to avoid the friction of requiring customers to complete certain tasks manually.

Chase makes it easy to set up autopayments to make it easier for customers to pay bills before the due date. We also help our customers set and reach their savings goals. We created Autosave, a way to make automatic transfers to Chase savings accounts—whether that’s daily, on a schedule or whenever they get a deposit. To speed up the process of opening a new account for our existing customers, we made sure that all of their personal information is prepopulated so they don’t need to retype it before submitting their application. 

We can expect automation to become even more prevalent in the new year, which will further improve our digital customer experience.

Real-time Payments

With social distancing and concerns about coronavirus on everyone’s mind, contactless forms of payments became more popular this year. We believe that this trend is here to stay even after the approval of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Throughout the year, more customers started using Chase QuickPay® with Zelle®⁴ to send money to friends and family or split a bill nearly instantly. Those who used real-time payments, did so with greater frequency. For example, Zelle transactions across the entire network of participating banks in the U.S. totaled more than one billion payment transactions between September 2019-2020 and in Q3 2020, this represented 323 million transactions— an increase of 17% quarter-over-quarter.⁵

In 2021, we’ll continue to see expanded use cases for real-time payments offered by banks to their consumer and business customers as people continue to use their phones or computers to make transactions.