The Future of Mobile Banking Apps: What Should We Expect?

So what are the trends, and hence innovations, in the future of mobile banking apps? Let’s look at them now.

Building Up Security

While the positive impact of mobile banking on customer service is indisputable, all of it will be nothing without proper security. Mobile apps create a new attack surface for cybercriminals to exploit; hence banks need to constantly build up and upgrade their defenses. After all, security leads to trust and trust leads to customer loyalty.

Here, artificial intelligence and machine learning play a crucial role. They can be leveraged to analyze patterns and expose attack attempts in time, enabling security teams to react quickly. What is more, they can help your customers as well – by monitoring their typical behavior in an app, AI can block access to an app (requiring second-factor authentication) whenever it spots suspicious log-in attempts.

Learn more: Digital Security and Trust: Building Confidence in Online Banking Services

Bespoke Mobile App Banking

Another key trend that we can observe in the future of mobile banking apps (but also business in general) is heading towards hyper-personalization. Customers expect their experiences to be tailored to them at all times, starting with the UI to the range of features and content in the apps.

Personalization can be achieved in various ways. For example, you may employ AI models that will segment your customers based on their transaction history. But it can go further. 

The optichannel banking approach embraces personalization through convenience, namely, providing users with the possibility to use the channel that suits them most. In practice, this means increasing the number of banking features in the apps so that the users wouldn’t have to use other channels to get things done.

User Experience in Mobile App Banking

We’ve tackled this a little bit in the previous section, but we need to describe it fully. The future of mobile apps in banking will be set with the goal of delivering the best possible user experiences. Two factors cause this:

• Rising customer acquisition costs – It became extremely expensive to acquire customers. Therefore, it is much more profitable to polish the experiences and hence achieve lower churn rates.
• Experience might be the make or break – UX design is one of the most critical building blocks of any digital product, including mobile apps for banking. Customers not only strive but even expect solutions that are intuitive.

How will user experience be polished in the future of mobile app banking? With digital customer service platforms, AI (both to understand the customers and to map up their journey through the app to locate bottlenecks), and clever UX and UI designs. Even AI chatbots may be helpful in this case, namely by providing 24/7 customer support.

Improving the Number of Mobile App Features

While mobile banking apps offer convenient digital banking, in many cases, they still lack access to all the services offered by financial institutions. The future will bring changes in this aspect.

What features should be included in every app? Let’s take a look at what are the most important functions and features (worldwide), according to the iSky report cited by The Financial Brand.

• Cancel lost or stolen card.
• View account balance.
• View account transactions.
• Access account documentation.
• Login credentials recovery.
• Suspend/block ATM/credit card/debit card transactions.
• Manage card-account links.
• Request new card PIN.
• View complete card details.
• Edit login credentials and card PIN.
• Active new physical cards.
• Manage recurring payments.
• Order a new card (without canceling the old one).
• Initiate transactions pre-login.
• Edit customer profile.

Conclusions

The future of mobile banking apps brings further improvements, ones that we can see already among the market leaders. AI and ML also play a role in this transformation, as they enable us to carry out these upgrades. Yet, the true extent of what will happen in the future still remains to be seen – after all, we do not know what technologies humanity will create that will help us develop even better apps.

You might also read: The Impact of Mobile Apps on Customer Service in Digital Banking

Sources:

iSky via https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/digital-banking/mobile-banking-trends/the-top-15-mobile-banking-features-consumers-want-most-162973/