Dive Brief:
- The top capabilities mobile banking apps can offer customers are the ability to easily view balances, find a transaction and move money, Forrester found in research released last month.
- Customers expect more from their mobile banking apps, and banks are racing to meet their needs. But in rolling out those capabilities, banks have some weak spots. The user experience of savings tools, alerts and transaction disputes can all be improved, Forrester found.
- “It's a theme that we've seen before — sufficient but unspectacular,” said Peter Wannemacher, principal analyst and author of the report. “In banking, you should aim for exceeding expectations. You should aim for differentiating your brand. And on the whole, banks are not doing that.”
Dive Insight:
Banks are struggling to make their mobile apps stand out, but that doesn’t mean there haven't been notable improvements.
“The goal posts are moving,” Wannemacher said. “Mobile banking apps are markedly better today than they were 10 years ago or even five years ago. But consumers’ needs, behaviors and expectations have changed.”
The pandemic altered consumers' expectations. 2020 was the first year that a majority of bank customers in the United States said they should be able to do all their banking activities through a mobile app. Now, that expectation has risen to two-thirds of customers.
More and more customers are becoming mobile only. One-quarter of banking customers in the U.S. have only used mobile banking in the past month, according to Forrester.
Payments, personal data management, debit and credit card management tools, and the process of opening accounts are now table stakes. But banks can differentiate their apps by providing natural language search and chatbots, subscription management, and credit building and debt management.
Two banks in particular, U.S. Bank and Bank of America, led the pack in offering the best banking app experience, according to Forrester. Both have improved their conversational assistants.
“Bank of America and US Bank have done the best job of any bank in North America of improving their conversational capabilities in a way that actually helps people find and complete tasks,” Wannemacher said.
