Online banking users worldwide in 2020 with forecasts to 2024, by region

The use of online and mobile banking is expected to increase steadily between 2021 and 2024, with the Asian market being the largest. In 2020, Far East and China accounted for over 805 million active online banking users. This figure is predicted to reach nearly one billion by 2024. Although Asia was the largest market for online banking in 2020, the countries with the largest online banking penetration rate were all European. South Korea ranked sixth, with a penetration rate of 74 percent.

What are the benefits of online banking?

Online banking comes with many advantages. On the one hand, it provides customers with an easy and fast way to conduct banking operations, allowing them to avoid visiting banks’ physical branches. Moreover, as more and more customers conduct their banking operations remotely, banks can decrease the number of physical branches and reduce maintenance costs. Over the last ten years, the number of branches of FDIC-insured commercial banks in the United States decreased by more than 10,400. Among the most demanded features of mobile banking, U.S. mobile banking users perceived the possibility of detecting breaches in one's Social Security number as the most valuable one.

Digital-only banks

Digital-only banks, also known as challengers or neobanks, are recently-established banks that have no physical branches and provide banking facilities only through digital platforms. These banks leverage their low maintenance costs and streamlined operations to challenge the large incumbents that dominate the banking sector. The market size of digital-only banks worldwide stood at roughly 47.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, and it is predicted to soar to 2.05 trillion U.S. dollars by 2030. As of 2021, the Brazilian Nubank ranked first among the most valuable independent digital-only banks worldwide, followed by the U.K.-based Revolut and the San Francisco-headquartered Chime.