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Native Mobile Apps is Banking’s New Wave
For more than a decade, banks have been attempting to captivate consumers with fancy chatbots, cutesy automatic savings tools — and a mobile banking experience that doesn’t quite seem to keep pace with evolving technologies, or consumers’ expectations.
As a result, consumers have been stuck in a digital rut — caught up in a web of outdated banking experiences that may move money from A to B, but fall short of performing the advanced functions that can truly elevate the experience.
The issue: The continued reliance on clunky, choppy web apps, which are about as prehistoric as dinosaurs — and move just as slow. For the uninitiated, a web app is simply a website packaged with a “wrapper” that masquerades as a native app on the smartphone, but without the speed, convenience, and simplicity of a purpose-built application. If you’ve ever struggled to get a sports score through ESPN’s mobile website, and later got it lightning-quick through their purpose-built mobile app, you know what we mean.
We’ve just seen digital banking morph from “important” to “existential” status. Banks and credit unions that don’t serve their customers in an entirely mobile capacity are now facing an existential threat.
The question we face now, though, isn’t whether they can adapt, but how quickly they can adapt. How fast can customers be served remotely? How fast can the institution adapt its strategy? Speed is the new currency! Gonzo Banker
Today, winning on mobile requires a dedicated approach — and native apps are leading the way.
Native apps are purpose-built for the smartphone — offering access to the kind of rich functionality and responsiveness that only a true native app can provide.
People view 4.2x more products per session within apps, compared to mobile sites. Apps also push more people down the purchase funnel, with 3x higher conversion rates compared to mobile sites and even 1,5 times more conversions per session than via desktop.
To keep up with the flood of fintech offerings, credit unions and community banks must align with technology and design partners who can provide the mobile mastery to mesmerize users both new and old. The speed and simplicity of digital banking services is the new version of in-branch convenience and caring.
If your credit union or community bank is still serving up the warmed-over leftovers of Web 1.0, it’s time to adopt a “Mobile-First” posture that begins with the transition to a stellar native app, offering a seamless and solid UI/UX experience.
Consumers are a finicky lot, and they love doing everything on their smartphone: Recent research shows that 90 percent of a consumer’s time on their smart device is spent in an app; and companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram have set the standard for what’s considered an acceptable UI/UX app experience.
The good news is there are companies that are helping to deliver this “Mobile First” promise to community banks and credit unions. At BankingON, our singular focus is the development of native apps for Android & iOS, as a replacement to web-based hybrid or cross-platform applications.
This unification of resources under a combined, consistent interface with an intuitive consumer journey can help attract new customers — and prevent the current consumer base from voting with their feet as a result of a less-than-ideal experience. This, by the way, is not conjecture, but a real risk that similar-sized banks have experienced. One study said that banks typically lose upwards of 12.5 percent of deposits when consumers experience friction within the app.
Myriad benefits await both financial institutions and consumers when a Mobile-First approach is adopted. These include:
1. Personalization: It’s critical to anticipate consumers’ needs so they’re empowered to easily make informed decisions. Creating native apps that are personalized for individual users can create distinct advantages, measured in loyalty and retention. Design drives conversions and conversions result in revenue.
2. Simplicity: By simplifying the consumer’s daily financial life, human-centered design decisions can help your organization achieve its sales, satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue goals. Integrating a mobile design and user experience with a Financial Institution’s existing core processing and online banking technology/vendors/solutions/services is the peak of mobile banking efficiency.
3. Trust: Giving control to users entices them to interact in a mobile-first manner, managing their own level of engagement and building a higher level of trust with their bank.
4. Brand Connection: People download apps because they want an authentic mobile experience. You may struggle to remain competitive if your banking app is just a mobile version of your online banking. They want to manage their money conveniently and with a minimum of screen taps and swipes. Branding is the only acceptable commonality between your website and your mobile app. Everything else should be minimized, simplified, and decluttered. That is why it’s called an application. It has a specific purpose.
5. Performance: A native app resides on the device and doesn’t have to “re-download” itself every time it’s opened. A wrapper app on the other hand does have to download the Web forms and screens that aren’t preloaded in the app itself. This means a native app is faster and highly available, which is critically important for financial services.
6. Fit and finish: As good as mobile Web technology has become, it is not always as responsive as a native app, or as powerful in terms of the capabilities it can support. For example, wrapper apps cannot enable the deposit of a check via a camera-equipped smartphone, a capability that is increasingly in demand. Wrapper apps can’t take advantage of some of the core code that is in the operating system of the phone itself allowing inherently good user experience and smooth transitions.
Remember, people download apps because they want an authentic mobile experience — a simple and convenient transaction with a minimum of screen taps and swipes.
