Citizens Bank Sharpens Mobile Banking App

What’s the difference between an iPhone and a bank account?

That may sound like an elementary school riddle. But when Chris Powell, head of deposits and customer engagement at Citizens Bank, poses the matter, he’s not indulging in wordplay, but a critique of usual banking practices.

“Nobody goes out, buys a new iPhone, gets halfway through setting the thing up and then throws it in a drawer, saying it’s too complex,” says Powell. “But consumers seem to do this all the time with checking accounts.”

Of course, they aren’t literally tossing their checking account into a bureau drawer. But they might as well be, according to Powell. They don’t generally leave a parting note, but they leave signs. Hints of coming attrition include not turning on direct deposit or bill pay on the account, not loading account credentials into a digital wallet, and everything else that makes checking accounts financial hubs. When consumers fail to follow through, it generally means that something about the experience is frustrating them, Powell says.

Often, Powell says, when Citizens researchers ask why people don’t use their accounts significantly, or just shutter them, they hear about fees, about difficult digital experiences, or even something as simple as clunky logins. Deeper digging has driven Citizens to begin releasing new digital features to encourage consumers to engage and stick with the bank.

Finding ways to keep existing customers happy and to attract new ones is critical because American financial consumers are restive. With the Fed cutting rates, consumers are more likely to look around for better returns on their money. On top of that, many customers are feeling increased financial strain due to inflation and other factors, and want more help from their financial providers.

To respond, Powell and his team to begin creating new digital features for Citizens customers and developing others to come. In an interview, Powell explained the thinking behind the bank’s new efforts, including its pilot virtual financial assistant, called “CiZi.”

Virtual Assistants Must Not Only Answer Questions, But Provide Direction

Personal experience has guided some of Powell’s thinking. He has maintained accounts with other providers to see what worked and what didn’t. A particular frustration was having to phrase and rephrase queries multiple times until he hit upon the way other institutions’ apps could respond.

“To me, that is the equivalent of a someone not listening to me when I engage with them in person,” says Powell.

Powell says that the bank’s vision for CiZi has been to change the role of the virtual assistant for consumers. He says the goal now is to not just tell users of the bank’s mobile app where to go in the app to accomplish a task or gain information, but to help the user get things done.

CiZi is a work in progress, but he says the bank wants to advance past simple chatbot functions to problem solver. That means training CiZi to understand and communicate in language that people really use.

“What if you go into the chatbot and say, ‘I lost my wallet and I want to freeze my debit card’?” says Powell. He says the bank wants to keep things simple and to integrate the actual task into the response.

So, in this example, instead of just digitally ushering the consumer to the right place, Citizens is building CiZi to perform the task. Powell wants CiZi to be able to respond, “OK, the card’s frozen. And would you like to submit a fraud claim?”

Two tasks CiZi has already been equipped to handle are setting up direct deposits “in seconds,” according to Citizens, and how to link a Citizens debit card to a digital wallet. More such are coming.

“We’ve been getting good adoption and usage early on” for CiZi, according to Powell. “Bringing it forward in a way that becomes more engaging and empowering for the customer is going to be a key unlock.”

Powell says CiZi’s role is also to create stickiness and ongoing engagement with the Citizens mobile app. “The old way of doing this was to hang features in the mobile app and hope the customers find them,” says Powell. “The new way is to walk them through a very simple, curated experience.”

Hand People Tools, Not Just Digital Brochures

Powell’s says that content marketing can only go so far. Most major banks provide a wealth of articles about many aspects of personal finance. But, to Powell, this approach is static, responding to a customer need with “some canned facts” that they may not get around to acting on. Even if an institution’s articles provide some education and insights, they don’t move things forward for the consumer.

Powell’s goal is for the bank’s digital face is to make it possible to be “actionable in the moment.”

Take the desire to save, a goal that more and more consumers have, says Powell. Many consumers face tighter circumstances today and when they say they want to be able to save more, they aren’t talking about an all-encompassing financial plan that will take them through to retirement age. They simply want help in putting some set amount of money by.

“We hear from customers, ‘I want a basic savings plan’,” says Powell. “We’ve got a lot of customers who just want to save $5,000, but they’re not sure how.”

Citizens’ response is its “Citizens Savings Tracker.” Powell describes it as an “MVP” — minimal viable product — that the bank will continue to hone as it gains more experience. This mobile-banking feature helps the customer frame how much they want to put by, what their time horizon is, and how to automate the saving once the goal is settled.

Using the tracker, customers can choose to have transfers made to their savings accounts from checking. They can also set up automatic roundups, contributing the “change” from debit card purchases towards the savings goal. In addition, the bank’s Smart Save feature analyzes spending patterns and periodically transfers up to $5 from checking to savings to help the savings plan.

Another new effort from Citizens is the Checking Account Benefits Calculator. This tool is designed to help customers make the most of the bank’s loyalty programs by matching customer activity to rewards, discounts and other incentives.

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Serving Customers ‘Anywhere and Wherever’

Citizens has been expanding its retail banking footprint in the last few years, including a push into the New York metropolitan area via two acquisitions. Powell says the increased focus on digital strategies is complementary to the physical expansion, rather than in competition with it.

“People’s lives increasingly are happening anywhere and wherever,” says Powell. The bank needs to be nimble enough to figure out meet customer needs both digitally and physically, where it has presence, and to adapt when consumer plans change.

Here’s where the bank’s digital interface and its human element can intersect. One of Citizens’ newer tools is an appointments function. This can be especially relevant for millennial and Gen Z consumers because they often want to consult a banker face to face but they just don’t pick up a telephone to book an appointment by voice. Powell says he’s noted the same phone phobia among younger employees. “It’s just not how they like to interact,” says Powell.

While the scheduling tool makes it easier to set up consultations, appointments get broken and sometimes life happens. Customers don’t show.

Powell says that’s where the human element can kick in. An alert banker can follow up on a broken appointment to see if there’s another way to handle a customer’s need or concern. A video chat might be in order, for example.

“I guarantee that even down the road, no customer is ever going to say that the only reason they bank with Citizens is because we’ve got this great AI tool that gives advice,” says Powell. “What’s really impactful is seeing the whites of the eyes of the banker across from them” — figuratively or literally — “and benefiting from the relationships they form.”

But Powell adds that approaching customers strictly based on their age demographics is a mistake. Instead of dividing the consumer base into broad bands based on generation, the mix is more like a checkerboard. Some sub-sections of generations have differing preferences that may look like other generations.

Case in point: Use of Zelle. It’s a digital payment tool and a form — person-to-person payments — initially identified as popular among younger generations.

Yet Powell says some older, more affluent customers, though deeply involved with the bank, are Zelle power users, sending funds to their friends digitally all the time.

“Personalization is the aspiration,” says Powell, “but getting it right requires a lot of deep, detailed work.”