Mobiles do 40 branches' work: St George

The number of mobile transactions made by St George Bank customers, if handled as face-to-face transactions, would require 40 branches to process, the bank's CEO Rob Chapman said this morning.

(Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet Australia)

"Customers are conducting 250,000 transactions per month from their mobile devices," Chapman told the FST Media Future of Banking and Financial Services conference in Sydney, stating that he was informed this would be the equivalent workload of 40 bank branches.

St George Bank receives more than 1 million inquiries via mobile devices per month, said Chapman, pointing to the bank's iPhone app that was launched early last year.

The CEO said that the iPhone app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since its launch and is used by over 130,000 customers per month, with over 600,000 log-ins to the app per month.

"They are predominantly using the app to check balances, transfer money and pay bills," he said.

Since then, the bank has also launched an iPad app, and was the first bank in Australia to launch an app for Google Android. Chapman said the bank was planning on launching an app for BlackBerry Torch in the near future.

Chapman noted that the vast majority of transactions now occur online, with 463 million transactions with the bank conducted online in the last financial year. St George Bank has also recently started engaging with customers on social media including Twitter and Facebook.

"It's early days, and we don't have many Twitter followers as yet," Chapman joked.

In determining what technology the bank takes up, Chapman said the first priority was what would save the customer money, or make their life easier, but he said that was already the focus of his CIO, Dhiren Kulkarni.

"When the CIO of St George comes to me, he's the most customer-focused person in the room," Chapman said.