Bank of America has been making the rounds with the press touting the runaway success of its mobile banking solutions. Major stories ran in American Banker and The Wall Street Journal this week.

The bank, with 29 million online banking users, reports numbers just shy of the 2-million mark in mobile. That’s up from one million early this summer (post here). While it’s still less than 10% of online banking customers, it’s an impressive number considering fewer than 4 million mobile banking households exist in the entire country (see note 1).

Several other interesting stats from BofA:

• More than 40% of active mobile bankers
  — 
  someone who’s logged in within the past 90 days
  — 
  use an iPhone or iPod touch. That’s about double the usage you’d expect given Apple’s 23% share of the U.S. installed smart phone base (note 2, 3).
• The bank believes the mobile channel is driving some new business to the bank with 8% to 10% of mobile bankers, almost 200,000, having signed up for the service within 90 days of opening a BofA account (note 4).

Source: ChangeWave Research, survey of 3,800 cell phone users fielded Dec. 9 – 15, 2008 (link)

Notes:
1. See our latest Online Banking Report: Online & Mobile Forecast for more details.
2. The 23% figure does not include iPod Touch.
3. One other bank provided its usage numbers to the WSJ: Mississippi’s BankPlus reported 4,000 users with 60% of the usage (2,400) coming from iPhone users.
4. That number doesn’t seem all that surprising. You’d expect new customers would be somewhat more likely to sign up for new delivery channels than the existing base. And given typical banking churn, 10% to 20% of a bank’s customer base are new every year.