THE USAGE OF MOBILE BANKING APPLICATIONS IN POLAND: EMPIRICAL RESULTS

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to determine the scope of mobile banking applications use among retail bank customers in Poland. A brief review of different approaches to the mobile banking definition is presented, and the definition that corresponds to the current state of the mobile banking market has been pointed out. The paper also presents the evolution and development of mobile banking channel in Poland in the years 2000–2018. The number of active mobile banking users in the years 2014–2018 has dynamically increased from 3.5 in 2014, to over 11.2 million in 2018, which is much faster than the development of online banking. The quantitative study is based on a survey performed in 2018 with the use of the CAWI method, carried on a representative sample of 1012 Polish Internet users. The obtained results allow to explore the customers’ usage of mobile banking applications. It turned out, that these applications are already a popular communication channel among Polish Internet users – over half of respondents already have a mobile banking application installed on their device and ¾ of them use it on a day-to-day basis. The most common functions are checking the account balance or initiating a bank transfer. Furthermore, nine of ten users are satisfied with the use of their application. The results also suggest, that due to growing needs of mobile banking applications users, as well as the increasing usefulness and ergonomics of applications, the upward trend of mobile banking applications usage in Poland is not likely to slow down in the next few years.