Through superior banking UX design, modern mobile banking apps are easy to navigate. Users hardly ever get lost in the application. Mobile banking apps are also fast and safe, which are important requirements for fintech products. Possibly the most important feature that a good mobile banking app must have is superior User Experience (UX).
But what do we mean when we refer to banking app UX design?
User experience, and the process of designing it, is about finding a way to improve the usefulness and usability of an app. In this article, we will discuss the process of mobile banking app design. We will cover the following key areas:
- Benefits of a banking app
- What to consider when making a banking app
- Top features of a good banking app
- How S-PRO makes a banking app from scratch
Benefits of a Banking App
Before we go into the understanding of a banking app, let’s first understand the benefits it brings. This is important because when the stakes are high, then the level of development must be just as high.
By looking at the end result of having a good banking app, we can understand why so much effort goes into creating banking apps with the best UX for customers:
1. Grow Your Base
Banking apps are made with the goal of keeping existing clients happy and winning new clients. A good app can set you apart from the competition and broadcast your service and innovation to a bigger audience.
Ukrainian online-only bank Monobank grew its customer base from zero to 2.6 million people in just 3 years by offering innovative mobile banking UX solutions.
2. Learn About Your Customer
In the age of big data, we have the tools and the know-how to collect vast amounts of information about customer habits.
As app technology improves, we can get better at collecting and activating this information for the benefit of the bank and the customer. For example, banks can easily calculate customer risk profiles through their habits and offer their clients attractive deals.
3. Reduce Costs
Physical branch coverage is in decline in many areas of the world. Why invest in extensive brick-and-mortar bank branches when apps perform many of the same functions?
It’s not just the physical infrastructure of branches that costs money, it’s the extra people, consumables, security, branding, and much more.
4. Drive New Services
Online banking apps get great engagement from users. When banking apps are seamlessly integrated into users’ daily lives, it gives banks the opportunity to present new services.
Today, it is normal to pay for items like bus rides, household shopping, and holiday payments natively from a banking app. In doing this, banks can make it easier for users to access new banking services like applying for extra credit.
5. Market Your Brand
Consumers stick to brands that have given them good service in the past. Good banking apps promote customer loyalty.
Traditional marketing is expensive and sometimes difficult to measure, but a good banking app can encourage customer retention while measuring engagement at the same time.
What to Consider When Creating an App
The best app design has a simple UX part. Banking apps deal with hard-earned customer funds, so the bar for performance is high.
Customers expect cutting-edge digital development that is safe and fast. But the technology must also combine usability, helpfulness, and it must keep up with the times.
Here are the most important factors to consider:
- User-friendly design
- Multi-device capability
- Flexible enough for upgrades
It’s important for banks to take into account banking UX trends as they create user-centered banking apps.
Customer preferences are a good resource to feed into the development of good UX. Customer engagement provides a powerful feedback loop for designers.
Using this information, banks can create intuitive interfaces, simple designs, personalization, and beautiful apps.
However, as clear as customer preferences are, designers cannot rush the process of designs and upgrades. To effectively build a mobile banking app, the process needs to be organized well. Even something as small as adding a feature requires careful and comprehensive planning.
Citizen Bank in the US suffered a major loss of customer confidence when an upgrade went wrong. Many users were unable to process payments, while others had issues with logging into the app.
Mobile banking app development must be a carefully considered process. After researching if there is customer demand for a new feature, teams can run AB testing to implement the solution. This should only be rolled out to a small number of users initially. Then, a development team must collect feedback and perform changes to the updates if this is needed before mass rollout.
Top Features of a Good Banking App
Banking apps already have a long record of market performance, so banks already have a good idea of what customers need. We already know that the most regularly used features of a common banking app are as follows:
- Account balance enquiry
- Payments and transfers
- Transaction history
- Branch and ATM locator
- Currency exchange and calculator
- Bank contact methods
In line with these trends, banks are advised to use this information to input the following features into their apps:
1. Make Important Data Easy to Find
One of the most sought-after pieces of information is the high-level financial overview. Users just want to know how much money they have. Some banks can overcomplicate things and make it hard to find the bottom line account balance among other numbers like incoming, outgoing, and pending funds.
The best UX is simple UX, and the same goes for what information is shown on the banking dashboard. However, this is not to say that banks cannot test new ways to show financial overviews according to customer feedback.
2. Enable Easy Authorization
Banks face a fine balance between convenience and safety. Biometrics is an increasing requirement in modern banking apps. Users want to have access to their banking app as quickly and easily as possible.
Banks that don’t do this will fall behind. Mobile apps are mobile for a reason, customers are usually on-the-go and don’t have much time. A simple act like logging on to the app must be fast and safe at the same time. Quick balance checks and other authorizations must be easy and seamless.
3. Facilitate Rapid Payments
Making quick payments is one of the top priorities of the customer experience.
The turnaround time for payments is getting shorter. Older customers might remember filling in paper forms with several fields. But today’s customers can simply tap or shake their mobile phones to authorize payment.
Banks should strive towards sending money instantly, without fees, between different banks and service providers.
Another type of payment that banks can fine tune is the routine monthly bill such as a rent payment. Users have to remember to visit the payments section of the app every month to make the same payment. How about using AI settings to automatically send push notifications so the user can pay repeat bills with a single tap?
4. Make Sense of Spending Trends
Many people have difficulty managing their finances. Banks can use spending trends to provide customers with valuable information at a glance. They can provide a look at spending trends and pending bills while providing financial advice in an intuitive way. This would help those customers who need it, and give them a chance to take control of their affairs in order to improve them.
5. Make Reaching Financial Goals Fun
For the fintech app to fulfil its growing role in a user’s life, it has to serve as a companion in achieving bigger financial goals. Banking apps can play a powerful function in motivating and helping customers achieve financial stability.
This is where gamification comes in.
Gamification uses human-driven incentives to get banking clients to do what banks want them to do. Besides exciting and engaging banking audiences, banks can get customers to change some elements of their behavior by rewarding certain actions.
6. Offer Great Personalized Offers
Banks should not miss the opportunity to make the most of personalized offers through their banking apps. They already have so much useful information about their customers that it should be an easy process. These promotions can drive customer retention as customers feel valued by their bank.
By applying information from customer spending patterns and knowledge of their location and preferences, banks can arrive at a smart analysis of what customers might find valuable. For example, using AI, a bank can detect that a customer is purchasing a new car, and it could offer tailor-made vehicle insurance.
7. Voice-Enabled Mobile Banking
The modern customer values speed and convenience. Banks know that they are competing on core services, but they are also competing to find the next edge in simplicity and convenience. If banks can give users the ability to get AI voice-driven support, this could be the next frontier.
We are seeing the rise of helper bots, but the next wave could be a helpful financial AI assistant who verbally interacts with the client and can prepare and approve proposals for a certain number of service requests backed by AI and real-time analytics.
8. Create a Financial Ecosystem
Large financial groups offer clients a myriad of different financial services, but often, users cannot extract maximum value from these products. This is in part because of the difficulty in identifying what benefits the product would bring, whether the user needs it, and how to combine the services.
This is why the best banking apps should concentrate on bridging this obvious gap. Banks can do this by applying themselves to delivering a UX and UI that combines the best of a number of accounts such as deposit accounts and credit accounts. But they could also take it further and integrate the full basket of products such as insurance policies and investment accounts.
How S-PRO Creates Banking Apps
S-PRO uses best practices in all these areas to create banking apps with cutting-edge mobile banking UX. Product development has many phases that often blend into one another.
Here are just some of the steps that go into creating a product with quality banking UX:
1. Apportion Ownership
Each project starts with a client vision. We ask the project owner within the client about their inspiration for the app. We discuss which apps the client wishes to model theirs from. We also discuss colors, logos, and branding.
Using this information, we conduct market research and perform a thorough competitor analysis.
2. Discovery Phase
To develop a user-centered design in banking, it is imperative that we perform preliminary research, which is an intense exploration of the client’s industry.
To ensure the best results, we gather focus groups and compare applications and functions that we need to implement. We explore a lot of material from sources such as Pinterest and Behance, in addition to understanding what has made earlier apps work well.
Learn more about the Product Discovery Phase.
3. Conduct Research
There is valuable customer information in learning how people use fintech services on a daily basis. In searching for this information, we will ask the client to make a video of how clients use the application.
We analyze information such as how many clicks the user performs, and what app features they focus on. Another good source of information is how the touch area is used by most clients.
4. Design Prototyping
The design prototyping stage is very important for creating a good UX design. Each design should have the main features of usability and usefulness at its core. These are some of the key elements that are presented to the client at this stage:
- App design sketch
- Basic app prototype
- Mockups including colors, fonts, and pictures
- Mood board
If our designers are given the best brief, they can apply a technical eye to create an application according to specification.
The Bottom Line
Banking apps have taken convenience to a whole new level. Gone are the days of standing in lines at the banking branch. Filling in forms to make deposits and withdrawals is a thing of the past.
Quality banking app UX design can make banking services stand out. Poorly designed UX can cost banks important market share.
Competitors in the fintech space are in a race to constantly improve their mobile banking UX. This will go a long way to ensuring customer success.
