M-banking grows 138 percent in Brazil
Mobile banking is taking off in Brazil with a 138 percent adoption growth registered between 2014 and 2015.
According to numbers by the Brazilian Banking Federation (Febraban), the number of banking transactions carried out via a mobile device has gone up from 4,7 billion in 2014 to 11,2 billion in the following year.
Currently, m-banking accounts for 21 percent of 51 billion operations that take place across the 17 largest banking institutions in Brazil.
The increase is significant given that in 2012, mobile accounted for less than 1 percent of all banking transactions.
As the mobile channel expands fueled by growth in the local smartphone market, online banking started to see a decrease in popularity, accounting for 33 percent of all transactions carried out in 2015, down from 37 percent in 2014.
Brazilian banks have been making big investments to respond to the demands of tech-savvy customers: Febraban numbers suggest that these institutions have invested R$19.2bn ($5.3bn) in technology in 2015.
This places Brazil 7th in the global ranking of investments in technology within banking in relation to GDP, according to Febraban.