With COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders raging on, visiting the local banking branch — or even the ATM or drive-through — is off-limits for many customers. This of course means more opportunity to provide excellent service via your mobile apps and websites. With approximately 57 million mobile banking users in the U.S., representing about 43 percent of all mobile users in the U.S., consumers are increasingly comfortable logging in to view accounts, transfer funds, pay bills, or use other banking services on their mobile phones.
However, now is the time to determine whether the mix of features and the overall user experience meets your customers’ or members’ needs. They may have more than one mobile banking app on their phones, and they may expect a particular set of features across all of them.
Apart from providing basic functionality (such as the ability to check balances), financial institutions need to consider the entire app experience, selecting the right mix of features that resonate the most with users. Firms should consider a partner like Lumin Digital to help them deliver best-in-class solutions that meet the banking needs of their customers and members. Let’s have a look at four 4 steps to creating the best banking app for your members.
1. Use AI to Personalize and Simplify Frequent Transactions
Personalization is something customers and members come to expect. If there is something that can be simplified or that needs attention, the app should present it in a friendly, but professional, non-intrusive way.
Financial institutions can present a more personalized banking experience based on customer usage patterns of certain features. For example, with bill pay, AI can note trends in payments to particular payees. AI can suggest setting up automatic payments or other bill payment preferences to facilitate this task. A convenient, “Turn Off Suggestions” option can also go a long way in delighting users.
2. Manage the Hard Sell
Ads for credit cards and mortgages are nothing new. However, when there are too many of them — especially when a customer is not in the market for opening new lines of credit or for buying a home — customers or members can grow weary or impatient with the volume of advertisements.
Lumin can help financial institutions develop, plan and launch the right mix of mobile advertisements that serve to inform customers without the hard sell. Too many ads can damage the mobile banking experience — including slowing down the app as the ads load.
3. Create a Sense of Security
With COVID-19-related fraud cases on the rise and with warnings from the U.S. Department of Justice, customers are more wary than ever that their personal information may be compromised. This may seem disconnected to mobile banking security, but many customers consumers are more cautious than ever of having their credentials exposed.
Indeed, banks and credit unions need to reassure their customers and members that their data is safe and that their transactions are private. Building additional security into apps is imperative. Reminding users from time to time of these added security measures can go a long way in allaying any fears and building trust in your brand.
4. Lean on Analytics to Improve User Experience
As we’ve advocated in the past, it’s all about user experience and providing banking sessions that delight the customer. Frustrations result when features are difficult to find or are not available. Banks and credit unions may not have volumes of survey results from customers requesting certain features or complaining about existing ones. However, Lumin can help your financial institution use advanced analytics to determine which features are being used (and which are not) as a way to better understand user behavior and demand.
Many mobile apps (including those for banking) suffer from bloat — too many apps on the same phone slowing down functionality, adding time to banking sessions and increasing users’ frustrations. Lumin helps you better understand how your customers interact with certain features of your app so you can optimize and improve the customer experience.
With personal finance and banking serving as the No. 1 and No. 3 fastest growing categories of mobile app usage, the Business of Apps reports that customers clearly see the value in managing their finances on the go, and they are increasingly reliant on the mobile apps of the institutions with whom they do business. Backed by data and years of experience, Lumin can develop solutions that your customers and members will find more secure, convenient, and intuitive.
Jake Wengroff writes about technology and financial services. A former technology reporter for CBS Radio, Jake covers such topics as security, mobility, e-commerce and IoT.
References
https://www.statista.com/topics/2614/mobile-banking/
https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-statistics/#3
