Comscore Snapshots: online finance in Europe

Scope: We include websites and mobile apps that provide financial services such as online payments, banking, trading, insurance, personal finance, and investments. Examples include Paypal, Societe General, and La Caixa.

Top line observations:

Broadly speaking, online financial websites and apps subdivide into six categories: banking, payments, financial services & advice, Insurance, Investments and taxes. Online banking is the largest category in terms of audience size, followed by payments. Moreover, the habit of accessing financial services solely through devices is now firmly entrenched: mobile-only audience sizes are larger than desktop-only and dual access audiences, across all categories.

Table 1. Finance sites and apps audiences in the EU5 region (Million unique visitors)

Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Jan 2021, EU5 region.

Another measure of how enthusiastically consumers access online financial services is reflected by the average time spent on them. In the EU5 region average time spent grew across all finance categories, except banking. Time spent on online payments services more than doubled between January 2020 and January 2021. Another interesting trend is the increase in time spent on investment services, which reflects a global trend of online trading among retail investors.

Table 2. Online finance usage intensity: time (in minutes) per visitor per month.

Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Jan 2020 – Jan 2021, EU5 region.

The trend of the unbundling of financial services stemming from the growth of fintech startups appears to be on hold, at least for now: the latest rankings of online finance services shows that traditional banks occupy most of the top spots.

Table 3. Selection of top online finance sites or apps with highest % reach

Source: Comscore MMX Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Jan 2021, EU5 region.