South Africa’s largest retail bank, Absa, will release its banking application to its staff next month and to consumers in the first quarter of next year, a spokesman for the company says. The app will be available first to users of Apple iOS and Google Android phones, with other platforms to follow later.

Absa is the last of SA’s big four banks to bring a smartphone-based banking app to market, but has previously defended the move saying that smartphone apps are only of use to a minority of its more than 11m customers and that the recent overhaul of its online banking service and its ATM upgrades benefit more people.

Christo Vrey, the bank’s managing executive for digital channels, has said previously that Absa’s app will support the smartphone operating systems “prevailing in the market” and will run on phones and tablets.

Now, Absa has revealed that iOS and Android will be the first platforms the bank will support and that the software will be available for BlackBerry users shortly thereafter.

There are no plans to develop a Windows Phone version of the app, at least not for the moment, because there are insufficient users of the platform to justify the expense of developing for the Microsoft platform, the spokesman says.