According to an American Bankers Association survey, the most popular banking method is mobile smartphone apps, followed by the internet on a laptop. Nikki Katz, Bank of America head of digital, joins Wealth! to give insight into the data and the behavior of digital banking clients.

Katz touches on the implementation of AI in digital banking: "I think the customers expect a great, convenient and smooth digital experience regardless of what part of their lives they're interacting with, but definitely in the financial space. And so I think the way we think about it is not so much what's the technology that's enabling it, which in this case is AI-driven, but really what's the best tool for getting our customers that ease and convenience that they're looking for?

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This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

According to the American Bankers Association, the A B A as you know them in your hood, 71% of Americans Bank using apps on their mobile devices or online via a laptop or PC and Bank of America says it's 57 million digital clients are increasingly using digital in more areas of their financial lives here to dive into the data.

We've had Nikki Katz who is the head of digital at Bank of America.

Nikki.

Great to see you.

Thanks so much for hopping on program with us.

Let's talk about this, this digital banking that you at Bank of America and the broader industry are seeing right now.

What are customers clearly tapping into and expecting of a digital banking experience as they are continuously leaning into technology?

Yeah, thanks for having me on Brad and increasingly what's obvious is that digital banking is becoming more and more central to customers relationship with their own finances.

And for us, we have 57 million clients who have opted to leverage digital channels for their banking and that number is actually growing by about a million a year.

But even more interesting than that is the fact that they're logging in more frequently.

And so the engagement numbers are far outpacing that growth.

So last year, we saw clients leveraging uh digital channels 23.4 billion times.

And that includes both, you know, roughly 13 billion times that they came to us to log in and their, their finances as well as roughly 10.5 billion alerts that they signed up to receive from us.

And so really digital is what we're seeing is a behavior shift where digital is becoming more and more central to our client's relationship with their finances.

They're using it more frequently and helping them be better connected.

And to your question around expectations.

I mean, I think what we're seeing is that clients expect it to be easy, they expect it to be convenient to do their banking.

They don't want to have to wait, they want to be able to self service.

And we're seeing that uh they're also expecting us to really partner with them in ensuring that their finances are on track.

So as an example of that, uh we have Erica, which is the industry's most widely used uh virtual financial assistance and clients interacted with Erica over 2 billion times since we launched.

And what's nice about that is that Erica is able to proactively give insights to our clients, things like, you know, hey, pay attention to your recurring subscription amounts or um you have a deposit that's coming in etcetera.

Erica is A I driven.

How many more A I driven experiences do you think customers are gonna be able to feel comfortable tapping into?

Especially as they move more and continue to be more digital about their banking approaches?

Yeah, I think the customers expect a great convenient and smooth visual experience um regardless of what part of their lives they're interacting with, but definitely in the financial space.

And so I think the way we think about it is not so much, what's the technology that's enabling it, which in this case is A I driven.

Um But really what's the best tool for getting our customers that ease and convenience that they're looking for.