The battle to win bank customers across Asia is not taking place on its high streets or even though its televisions and computer monitors – increasingly it is taking place in the palms of people’s hands.

As the region’s economies grow, become more urban and more middle-class, many industries are skipping stages of technological development that took years – even decades – to pass through in the west. Some banks have woken up to the fact that their industry is not just skipping a bit of history but that the people who should be their customers are coming to financial services from an entirely different starting point.

According to Egidio Zarrella, a partner at KPMG China, the professional services firm, that country’s consumers and banks are leading the way. “They don’t have the legacy systems and practices to overcome,” he says. “They can skip the branch build-out and capture customers straight on to the state-of-the-art platforms.”