Standard Bank said yesterday its transactional banking smartphone application had been downloaded by about 3‚000 users‚ hardly a day after launching on Wednesday afternoon.

It follows moves by major banks to provide convenient banking solutions to an increasingly mobile customer base.

“There has been an overnight explosion of smart devices ... with the behaviour of customers changing you have to adapt to their lifestyle‚” Itumeleng Monale the head of of self-service channels at Standard Bank South Africa said yesterday.

Ms Monale said research had shown that there were over 5 million smart phone users in SA and the numbers were rising.

“As of 13h00 today (Thursday) we had 3‚000 registered unique users. Our app is targeted at anybody who banks with us and has a smartphone. At the moment we do not have a segment bias at all.”

The Standard bank application can be downloaded by customers with BlackBerry‚ Apple iPhones and Android devices. The application allows Standard Bank customers to pay beneficiaries‚ transfer funds and buy airtime.

Ms Monale said funds transferred to the pre-loaded beneficiaries and registered cellphone users appeared instantaneously‚ she added. 

Ms Monale said Standard Bank had over a million customers active in online banking‚ and close to 2 million cellphone banking customers.

On the Standard Bank application‚ transfers can be made to pre-loaded beneficiaries and registered cellphone banking users‚ Ms Monale said.

This is not the first application that Standard Bank has launched. It already has an application which offers macro-economic research.

Ms Monale said on the transactional application Apple iPhone users were the dominant downloaders but Ms Monale said based on the profile of Standard Bank’s customer base there was an expectation that Blackberry users would have the dominant downloads.

First National bank‚ which has led the development of transactional banking applications in SA‚ said iPhone owners were the dominant users of its applications followed by BlackBerry‚ Android and Nokia Symbian‚ respectively.

Farren Roper‚  of FNB Connect said since launch in July last year the bank had “amassed more than 200‚000 App users”.

“We are quite surprised that it has taken our competitors this long to launch their own banking Apps. With the success that we had we did not anticipate that we would have the first mover advantage for very long‚ so it was important to ensure that we did not become complacent‚” Mr Roper said.

“We have processed 2 million transactions and recently crossed the R5 billion mark in terms of transactional value‚” Mr Roper said.

He added that the “numbers for the App are suggestive that we are getting it right‚ with active users month on month increasingly on the rise. In May for instance we had a record number of new customers in excess of 30 000”‚ Mr Roper said.

Nedbank CEO Mike Brown said yesterday the bank would launch its banking app with a suite of applications as part of a raft of new innovations that SA's fourth largest bank is introducing to improve service to its customers. It first launched the app to staff this week before rolling out to customers probably by August. As part of this process‚ Nedbank had also strengthened its internet security infrastructure which had performed about 5-million transactions in less than three months without any phishing attempts by cyber criminals.