Simon Russell, managing executive financial services, Accenture South Africa noted extensive positioning in the local mobile banking market with some innovative products including FNB's “Send Money” and Standard Bank's “Mimoney”.
Accenture said that in addition to the existing economic challenges, SA banks faced significant pressure from the competition commission, government access targets and more demanding consumer requirements.
"The winners, in the fight for market share, will be those banks with high customer loyalty delivered through greater customer centricity, convenience and low cost processing. Mobile banking enables all three," the group said.
Accenture said that the scramble for banks to partner with retailers, government institutions, gyms and other 'go to' locations, to provide cash out points had already begun.
Russell added that smaller innovative banks could also take on the mass market and grab a piece of the pie from Tier 1 banks through mobile banking.
"It's a challenge for the Tier 1 banks to defend with huge investments in ATM and Branch networks. Approximately 60 percent of a Bank's cost is typically in its distribution network," he said.
"Small innovative banks, using existing mobile technology, leveraging agents and through partnerships in other industries, can bring low cost, convenient transactional banking to consumers country wide thereby challenging the previous exclusive domain of the Tier 1 Banks."
"The 'attack strategy' will be to acquire customer transactional business through a combination of convenience and a low cost play - ownership of the transactional account is a prerequisite for understanding a customer's behaviour and for executing a successful customer centric strategy."
"A successfully executed customer centric strategy increases loyalty, decreases customer churn, increases the number of products sold to clients and increases profitability and Return on Equity," Russell said.
Accenture believes that mobile will evolve quickly from P2P payments, wallet, bill payments and general banking to more complex banking processes including Account Origination (identification and authentication) and finally true M-commerce - point of sale transactions.
Russell cautioned that Account Origination identification and authentication processes were dependent on mobile devices with camera and biometric capabilities, with implementation by roving sales and service agents.
"It will take time before these devices become affordable for the majority of the population. However, when they do become available, they will transform the mobile handset into a sophisticated banking sales and service channel that will challenge the prevalence of 'bricks and mortar' banking," he said.