Who’s Downloading Mobile Banking Apps?

Banks have been making their way into our smart devices for the last few years. With many things things around us becoming more immediate and on-demand, not having to visit the local bank’s branch is a welcome addition.

This week we’re looking at the most downloaded mobile banking apps in the U.S. App Store in September, and who’s downloading them. According to our estimates, the top five are: Chase, Bank of America, Capital One, Wells Fargo, and Citibank.

We’re estimating that the top five mobile banking apps were downloaded a total of 2.4 million times in the U.S. App Store in September. Chase and Bank of America lead the charge, accounting for nearly half of all of those downloads, and those split somewhat evenly between the two.

Wells Fargo and Capital One weren’t too far behind, indicating mobile banking is a trend that isn’t specific to a single bank. Between push notifications, online deposits, and quick access to transactions, mobile banking just makes sense.

In 2018, the top five mobile banking apps were downloaded more than 21 million times from the U.S. App Store according to our estimates. But, while the top four are very close, Citibank’s mobile app is lagging behind. When compared to the rest, Citi’s app was downloaded by about half the number of users as Chase.

Zooming in, we can see a clear trend:

There’s been a lot of movement earlier in the year with the main four fighting for top positioning. Chase, which started at #3 in January took the lead in April and has been #1 since. Bank of America remained in the #2 position, and Capital One dropped to #3. Throughout however, Citi has been planted firmly at #5.

Looking deeper, we can see the demographics of mobile banking app users, and as you can imagine they’re fairly similar. All five contenders cater to pretty much the same audience–everyone. Users of mobile banking apps distribute almost evenly into the four age groups between 18 and 64 according to our mobile intelligence.

In addition, our data shows the gender distribution to be nearly balanced but tipping a bit over towards males with a 60%/40% split.

Do you like your bank’s app? Is Citi’s app not up to par? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

The Data

The data in this report came from Explorer, our Mobile Market Intelligence platform. Use Explorer to discover and analyze millions of mobile apps with proprietary data-sets like the ones used in this post. Check it out →