Downloads for financial apps have grown significantly over the past few years, according to analysts at AppsFlyer. During the pandemic, the number of downloads grew more slowly, but has now returned to the previous pace. Investment applications have become widespread in Europe, downloads of other fintech applications are also growing.
Over the past two years – from Q1 2019 to Q1 2021 – downloads of financial apps have grown by 132%. In total, in the world during this period, fintech applications were installed 4.7 billion times. Such data are contained in a report on the financial applications market and published on Wednesday by the analytical marketing company AppsFlyer (Kommersant has it).
“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the world of fintech services, radically transforming the way users interact with financial institutions, and the way the institutions themselves operate,” the report’s authors note. “Mobile apps play a central role in the development of financial technology, especially in large emerging markets focused on mobile-first or even mobile-only, where hundreds of millions of users do not have sufficient access to banking services. ” If in the first half of 2020, during the first lockdowns in many countries, growth slowed down, then in the second half of the year the number of downloads of fintech applications began to grow again. In the period from the first quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year, the number of downloads increased by 20%.
AppsFlyer analysts have noted that the growth rate of installs for most categories of financial apps has accelerated over the past year. Last year and the beginning of this year, the demand for investment applications grew: during 2020, the average increase in their downloads for the quarter was 17-18%, and in the first quarter of 2021, the growth reached 28.7%. During this period, quite a lot of new users decided to start investing and trading on the stock exchange – this is associated with high volatility during the pandemic, and with measures to stimulate the economy in different countries, and with loud stories around the shares of GameStop, AMC and others. New retail investors it is usually through various applications that they start trading on the exchange, the most popular of which is Robinhood.
The rise in app downloads was particularly significant digital banking – financial institutions operating exclusively or mainly on the Internet, without physical offices.
Last year they grew by 45%, and in the first quarter of this year – by another 24%. The number of downloads in the sector grew not so significantly, but steadily financial services (applications for mobile transfers, money payments, budget management, etc.) – from the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 inclusive, the number of downloads increased by an average of 20% per quarter. Number of app installs traditional banking grew by 15% over the past year, although in the first quarter of 2021 this growth accelerated to 22%. Applications for lending grew very actively at the beginning of last year (growth in the first quarter was 32%), then growth slowed significantly in the second quarter with the spread of COVID-19, the introduction of lockdowns and a slowdown in economic activity – in the second quarter, the number of downloads increased by only 11.2%. Later, the growth in downloads of such applications either slightly accelerated or slightly slowed down, amounting to 19.1% in the first quarter of 2021.
In Russia, the growth in the number of downloads of financial applications slowed significantly in 2020, amounting to 21% per year compared to 51% in 2019. Most other countries in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) showed stronger growth: in Germany, the number of downloads of financial applications grew by 161% in a year, in the UK – by 129%, in Nigeria since the second quarter of 2020, growth was 160%. and in Turkey, in the first quarter of this year, the number of downloads increased by 110%. At the same time, Russia entered the top 5 in terms of the number of downloads in the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 – India took the first place, followed by Brazil, Indonesia and the United States, Russia closes the top five.
Most popular in Russia during this period there were applications traditional banking (43.6%), 22.6% of downloads come from investment applications, 20.4% from financial services, 13.4% from lending applications… “Russia has a very strong financial industry. Traditional banks have quickly moved to mobile, as reflected in their dominant share of total app installs, but we are also seeing a rise in other financial apps that we expect to become more widespread over time, ”said AppsFlyer CEO Russia and CIS Mikhail Zaitsev. For comparison: in Germany and the UK, the most popular applications for investment were: they account for 81.4% and 61.4% of all downloads of fintech applications, respectively.
The study also reported a significant decrease in the number of fraudulent downloads of financial applications in EMEA. In the region as a whole, the number of such fraud cases decreased from the second quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 by 77%. The number of such cases in Russia has dropped especially dramatically – by 88%. In France, the decline was 86%, in the UK – 81%, in sub-Saharan Africa – 77%, in the Middle East – 60%. AppsFlyer attributes this to “improvements in anti-fraud tools and a growing awareness of the risks of install fraud, especially among financial apps.”
According to the authors of the study, bot attacks remain the most popular method of cyberattacks on fintech applications in the region, accounting for 56% of all attacks.
At the same time, click-flooding is becoming more and more popular – in this case, scammers send a large number of reports on clicks allegedly from a specific user’s mobile device in the hope of making the last click before installing the application so that this installation is attributed to them: its share has grown from 8% in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 17% in the first quarter of 2021.
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