Hotcakes, you've got some competition: the phrase "selling like tablets" might soon enter the global lexicon. And it's not all hype — though there is a fair bit of that as well. Tablet users in the US are estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 51% from 2010 to 2015. That’s a fast-growing market for firms of all stripes.

As such, the tablet as a touchpoint is becoming a critical consideration for eBusiness & Channel strategists. This is especially true for executives at banks, as financial transactions benefit from the immediacy of the mobile channel, but users often struggle to make these transactions on smaller smartphone screens.

Enter tablet banking.

Forrester has previously identified best practices for tablet apps in financial services, but only in the past year have leading banks rolled out robust tablet banking efforts. One of the strongest tablet offerings we’ve seen is from Citibank.

In my new report, I outline the process Citibank went through in building its own tablet banking strategy, developing an iPad app, rolling it out to customers, and continually improving the service. We outline how Citi:

In the past week I’ve have the privilege of talking to (or listening to) executives responsible for mobile banking at some of Europe’s biggest banks, including Bankinter, Barclays Bank, La Caixa, Lloyds TSB, Nordea and RBS, at Forrester’s Marketing & Strategy Forum and at a conference on Next Generation Mobile Banking hosted by The Banker. I’ve also spoken privately to many other executives over the past few months, including at Forrester’s eBusiness Council meeting this week.

Without naming names, I’m struck by the sharply different perspectives these executives have. Simplistically, their view of mobile banking falls into two camps:

                Mobile is just another channel. These executives see mobile banking as a way of letting customers do old things, like checking their account balance, in new ways.

                Mobile will revolutionize retail banking. These executives believe that mobility could turn the retail banking industry upside down, by enabling customers to do entirely new things like scanning bills to make payments, responding to location-based offers, and receiving rewards at the point of sale.

Mobile banking adoption among US online adults more than doubled in the past two years. However,Forrester’s Technographics® data shows that 85% of online adults in the US have never used mobile banking. When we look more in depth at the reasons why, we get answers such as “don’t see the value,” “don’t believe it’s safe,” and “don’t want to pay for fees.”

US consumers have plenty of alternatives they can use, like ATM machines, online banking, and retail branches. For them, the benefits have to outweigh the hurdles. Yet it’s a different story in other parts of the world. Due to a lack of existing banking infrastructure, we see mobile finance penetration picking up quickly in developing markets like China, India, and even Africa, fueled by the growing cellular penetration and mobile Internet penetration in these regions. In fact, in the most recent World Economic Forum’s Digital Asia panel that Forrester CEO George Colony moderated, Michelle Guthrie, JAPAC director of strategic business development at Google Asia Pacific, stated that for the next hundred million users coming onto the Internet in Asia, primary access to the Internet will be on mobile, and maybe only on mobile due to the infrastructural challenges (and costs) of fiber and broadband.

In our new report, "The ROI Of Mobile Banking," Forrester presents a flexible model to help eBusiness and channel strategy executives estimate the ROI of — and outline the business case for — their mobile banking strategies. The resulting return on investment comes to roughly 15%. While positive, the ROI from our model is far from a ringing endorsement of mobile as a money maker for banks today.

For the report, we use our model to estimate the ROI of a multifaceted mobile banking effort by a US-based retail banking provider with 500,000 deposit account customers. Forrester’s model includes eight modifiable inputs: four cost inputs and four benefit inputs. These cover the cost of developing, testing, and implementing mobile services, as well as the potential savings and revenue that a provider might expect from offering such services.

Our findings do not mean mobile banking initiatives should be scrapped. Far from it: Supporting the mobile channel is no longer optional for banking providers in most markets. Their customers and prospects — especially the younger set of Gen Xers, Gen Yers, and teen Millennials — will demand it. Forrester’s Technographics® research shows that 22% of US online adults say it is either “important” or “very important” that the deposit account provider they choose offer access to their accounts through a mobile phone or device. And more than a third of adults younger than 35 feel this way.