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Nearly one-half (46 percent) of banking customers who use smartphones to conduct business do so from their bedroom, according to a Harris Poll survey of 2,024 U.S. adults, conducted on behalf of Feedzai, a big data science company.
But the bedroom isn’t their only banking locale. Thirty percent of survey respondents said they have banked from the bathroom, and 13 percent while driving.
Statistics for Millennials track somewhat higher. Sixty percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 bank from their bedroom. In addition, 20 percent of Millennials said they have made a mobile banking transaction at a bar or while driving and 13 percent said they bank while driving.” I think the most surprising stat from the survey is that 13 percent of mobile bankers have done it while driving,” Loc Nguyen, Feedzai’s chief marketing officer, told eWEEK. “Common sense aside, the implication is that people are engaged in something they have not done before, and in this case, are not supposed to be doing at all. Being able to detect what is the new normal pattern of behavior is key in stopping the abnormal, which is indicative of fraud.”
More than a quarter (26 percent) of online mobile shoppers have shopped while in the bathroom, and 8 percent of 18-34 year olds have shopped on their mobile phones while crossing the street.
Among online smartphone shoppers, 4 percent of them are shopping on their mobile phones while crossing the street or standing in line (18 percent). More than half of Americans (56 percent) still think it’s safer to use credit cards in physical stores than using them online when shopping–in the Midwest the number spikes to 64 percent.
Still, more than half of Americans believe cash is the safest way to purchase something (55 percent) while only one in five (22 percent) believe paying with credit cards is safest.
Interestingly, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of consumers said they have not changed their shopping behavior as a result of recent data breaches.
Men across the board are more willing than women to share their mobile data (34 percent versus 28 percent), online activity (32 percent versus 26 percent) and social networks (26 percent versus 20 percent), in exchange for protecting their personal financial information from being stolen.
Even so, almost a quarter (23 percent) of Americans said they would allow a financial institution access to their social network account; 29 percent would give access to online activity, and nearly one-third would give access to their mobile phone data (31 percent), in exchange for protecting their personal financial information from being stolen.
“There is no doubt that banking and shopping behaviors are changing; we will see more and more branch-less banking and relatively less physical commerce in stores,” Nguyen said. “We’re seeing mobile technology becoming the bridge that ties the online and in-person channels together, an omni-channel world. At the same time, we’ll be generating more and more data.”