The Ultimate Mobile Banking Experience: Personalization

What makes for the ultimate mobile banking experience? It’s more than 24-hour access and offering the same online services remotely. It’s not even about recreating the branch experience. It’s about exceeding expectations, offering convenience, saving time and money and giving people the advice they need when they need it. Mobile phones, and tablets applications can actually offer more insight than a local teller and the interface can lend itself to sharing up-to-date personal stats and timely notifications that a banking customer may need to know about. The ultimate mobile banking experience is about anticipating the customer’s next need and proactively offering smart assistance. Sound impossible? It’s not.

Forrester Research VP and Principal Analyst, Brad Strothkamp says that the digital channel should be “SUPER”: Simple, Ubiquitous, Personal, Empowering and Reassuring.

If Apple, Google or Amazon were in the banking space, how do you think their user interface and mobile applications would differ from what is being offered today by the most banks? Vastly different.

These companies take develop their products and services from a personalized consumer perspective, while banking apps tend to grow around existing product-sets, services and transactional technology. The integration and navigation between checking balances, investigating spending and depositing checks can take many clicks in most of today’s banking apps. The average user does not have the technical sophistication or time to learn how to navigate a comprehensive mobile banking environment.

Apple, Google and Amazon are much better at understanding users’ needs. They are able to leverage Big Data to provide each user with the most relevant products and services and to provide suggestions at the right time, and in an intuitive format, that makes taking the next step easy. Mobile banking apps just aren’t there yet. While there is a high level of acceptance of mobile banking, there isn’t a deep utilization of all the new services being offered on remote channels.

Brett King, author of Bank 2.0 said, “The future of banking is about connections with your customers, engaging them when and where they need banking to solve a problem or provide a service. Banks won’t be able to influence people with clever ad campaigns, better rates, or talk of branch networks. 
The only differentiation will be
how you anticipate their needs and serve them in their day-to-day life, wherever they may be.”

Personalization needs to be brought to a whole new level in mobile banking and many credit issuers and banks recognize this and are ‘banking’ on the mobile channel to differentiate themselves. So how are they looking to do this?

It’s about offering smart assistance. Big Data and sophisticated analytics are powering the next generation of mobile apps, giving the average banking customer new insights and the ability to act with one or two clicks. Each interaction is personalized and offers the banking customer intuitive options to solve top-of-mind and high priority needs quickly and smoothly. Personalized, smart assistance is becoming a reality for many mobile bankers today. Banks are moving from segmenting and offering banner ads and mailers to offering a custom mobile experience that leverages what the bank knows about that customer from across previous interactions and individual relationships.

“Quality of service and ease of use are what customers care about more than any other factors,” according to a World Retail Banking Report.

Personalizing the customer experience with smart assistance allows you to provide value every time a customer uses your digital channels. Do you want to provide your banking customers with the ultimate mobile experience? Post a comment below or tweet us with hash tag #UltimateMobileBankingExperience.

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