Mobile Banking Solutions: Back To Basics

By Clayton Locke, CTO, Intelligent Environments

With announcements of new mobile banking solutions happening every week, it is no secret that the mobile money marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive. In April, Vodafone partnered with ICICI Bank to launch M-Pesa in India, reaching out to an estimated 700 million ‘unbanked’ potential customers. With partnerships like this enabling more competition in mobile Financial Services, it’s clear that all companies in this space will have to up their game to succeed.

Mobile payment and banking apps require a carefully balanced set of criteria for success. Intelligent Environments reviewed most of the mobile and online banking applications in the market; analysing the benefits and faults of each to gain a balanced understanding of the industry, along with the gaps in current offerings that need to be closed to provide superior customer experience.

In order to provide consumers with an application that is genuinely useful, and to avoid simply innovating for innovation’s sake, here are five core rules that all organisations would do well to observe.

1) Simplicity

With new technology continually in development, it is easy for mobile financial services (FS) providers to fall into the trap of creating a solution in search of a problem. What the customer really wants is almost always grounded in the most practical and useful features of a software application. As banking and payments go mobile, this includes the capabilities to quickly and easily check an account balance, look at recent transactions, and make a payment. The demand for innovation is grounded in making things simpler.  A great example is innovation in biometrics, which could be a simpler and more secure way for customers to authenticate over the traditional password.

2) Security

This is a critical non-functional aspect of the user experience. Mobile security protocols are still very new and therefore mobile app vulnerabilities and malware are not as well known to many developers. Bank grade security and encryption is a necessary component of any mobile financial services product: features largely invisible to the customer but nonetheless a key source of competitive differentiation for the banks. Consumer trust depends entirely upon appropriate security protocols, and app developers have the opportunity to exploit new technology to take these protocols to the next level.

3) Speed

The average user accesses their online bank account once per week, whereas the average mobile banking customer will access their account once per day. These mobile customers expect instant access to their account on demand, putting enormous pressure on mobile money solutions to process higher transaction volumes with faster response, and all this over the air while the customer is on the move.

4) Cross-channel

Across the banking sector, mobile apps are getting a lot of focus, but desktop banking should also be redesigned so that it keeps up with customer expectation. Banks must deeply consider the cross-channel opportunities between mobile and desktop, ATM and branch. Responsive web solutions are the standard now; anything less is obsolete. Better, simpler, integration between banking channels, and into the payments networks and point-of-sale systems, is where our industry is headed. As the customer navigates through these channels, banks must ensure that the customer feels their brand experience in every interaction.

5) Offline support

App providers often fall into the trap of neglecting offline support channels when difficulties arise. This is a major oversight, especially as poor customer support in call centres and branches are major sources of dissatisfaction. Providers can be guilty of pouring all their thought and investment into the features of the app itself, rather than investing in the software or staff required for customer support. Innovation in banking and payments cannot stop at the app, but must extend to high quality customer service as part of the overall experience.

Ultimately, future innovation needs to put improvements to the mobile customer experience at the centre of any successful mobile financial services application. It’s vital that those companies competing in this increasingly crowded market use technology to raise the level of customer service, integrated across all of the multiple channels now used by today’s banking customers.