Absa’s transactional banking application for smartphones has been downloaded more than 300 000 times, the bank’s head of digital channels and payments, Adrian Vermooten, said on Thursday.

Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg, Vermooten said the app, which is available for Android, Apple and BlackBerry devices, enjoys peak usage at around 9am on a Saturday morning. Customers are using it to process more than R10bn/year in transactions, though that’s still small next to the R1 trillion/year in transactions processed by the 1,3m users of Absa’s Internet banking platform.

Vermooten said, too, that the app is used by customers, on average, four times as often as they use the bank’s traditional Internet banking platform. The bank launched its app 12 months ago. It was the last of South Africa’s big four banking groups to do so.

Vermooten said that the app forms part of Absa’s broader mobile strategy, which includes offering products that suit the entire market, from those using basic feature phones to those with top-end smartphones. He revealed that the bank has 4m mobile users and 1,3m people accessing its traditional Internet banking platform.

In mobile, Absa offers an unstructured supplementary service data, or USSD, service for entry-level devices. It also has a wireless Internet gateway, or Wig, service built into Sim cards and a mobile banking website.

Referring to other developments at the bank, Vermooten said Absa was nearly ready for the full launch of its Payment Pebble, developed in partnership with technology entrepreneur Stafford Masie through his company Thumbzup. The Pebble allows merchants to accept card payments on a device that connects to their mobile phones.