Mobile Banking & Generation 'Y'

As the decades roll by, I have lost track of which generation we are supposed to be paying attention to now. Is it still Generation X? Or is it the Gen Ys? Wasn’t there something in between? Which are the ones who never leave Momma’s house? I forget.

I have nothing against them personally. The two or three that have bothered to engage me in conversation seem perfectly okay. I don’t know for sure because they never look up from their mobile devices. They seldom finish a sentence either. And they shrug a lot. But that doesn’t make them bad. I’m not that interesting to talk to anyway. I used to think I was, but the Gen Xers and Yers cured me of my self-importance with that eye roll of theirs. Do they think we can’t see that?

So along comes Fiserv this week with a new study on the mobile bill pay and banking propensities of Generation Y. My daughter is a Y. I never thought of her that way before today. So I’m thinking Gen Xers must be the lazy ones who never left home because my daughter not only flew the coop the first chance she got, but she is smarter than me, more intuitively technical than me, much better at multitasking than me. And better looking by a long shot, but that goes without saying.

Anyway, back to Fiserv. The study Fiserv did with Accelerant Research shows that Gen Y was three times more likely to use mobile bill pay and mobile banking than Baby Boomers. I am still trying to determine if that surprises me or not. Three times. Really? I thought it would be more.

It is useful information as it helps service providers plan their spending on the right kinds of systems to support this wave and it helps device manufacturers meet the demands of users. And it doesn’t hurt Fiserv, whose investors can rest comfortably knowing their business will continue to grow. But the numbers seem a bit like the Chilean tsunami to me. It takes a while to realize that the three-foot waves that tickled the shores of Hawaii were no small geological feet, less than expected, but certainly no disappointment. It takes a lot of magnitude to send a wave 7000 miles (11,000 kilometers) across the ocean deep and still make a ripple at all.

Maybe I thought Gen Y would make us Boomers look like we made the Greatest Generation look when we flipped on our Commodore computers and left pen and paper behind. But 33 percent of Gen Ys to 11 percent of Baby Boomers using mobile devices in this way didn’t seem that big of a deal initially. However, the first wave of Gen Ys hitting the workforce is about 70 million, and when you think about the magnitude of change required for more than 23 million people to take up mobile banking in just a few short years, that’s a heck of a tsunami.

And the most amazing phenomenon about this shift in the way people use technology (which is not in the study, but in my own head) is that is appears Gen Y may be the first generation to make technology work for them rather than being controlled by it. That’s seismic.

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