"How does our mobile banking offering stack up?"
"Which mobile banking features should we be focusing our efforts on?"
"And how do we make sure we deliver an exceptional digital banking user experience?"
With customers increasingly unhappy with their banks' mobile offerings — in a 2022 survey, satisfaction scores were down 17 points over 2021 — these questions are looming larger and larger in product owners' minds.
But time constraints, heavy workloads, and, most importantly, limited access to relevant market data means that, all too often, your answers are, at best, educated guesses. As a result, mobile banking features you thought would help position you as a market leader often end up falling well short of the mark.
Well, we're here to tell you that digital banking research doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming.
In fact, if you use our digital banking research platform FinTech Insights, you can home in on what you need to know — and use it to build better mobile banking features and user experiences — in a matter of minutes.
In this post, we'll:
- Explain how FinTech Insights is different from traditional digital banking research techniques
- Show you how you can identify which mobile banking features would set you apart from your competitors with just a few clicks
What you're (probably) getting wrong about digital banking research
If you're like most digital banking product teams, you probably conduct digital banking research using one — or, more likely a mix — of the following techniques:
- Reading industry reports
- Evaluating competitors, if possible by opening accounts with them so you can experience them as one of their customers would
But chances are the knowledge you'll glean from these sources will be outdated and incomplete.
Most industry reports only contain the data which the featured banks and fintechs are comfortable making public.
A lot of information you might find valuable — like how they've approached a particular design challenge or regulatory issue — may be deemed "too sensitive" and, so, not revealed. More to the point, it takes several months for reports to be compiled, approved, and published.
The rapid pace of digital change means that, by the time a report is in your hands, the state of play may be drastically different. Mobile banking features announced in the report may have been updated, reworked, discontinued, or their launch canceled, for whatever reason.
Evaluating competitors, on the other hand, is laborious, impractical, and far from an exact science.
Let's assume you meet the eligibility criteria of every bank, credit union, and fintech you want to research and manage to open accounts with them. There's still no structured way for you to analyze each offering and run comparisons. It all has to be done manually.
So, getting the visibility you need to make informed decisions is still an uphill struggle.
Crucially, your competitors' mobile banking offerings might not be as market-leading or innovative as you think they are. Which means there's a risk you could be investing huge amounts of time, effort, and money without getting any closer to uncovering best practices, must-have mobile banking features, or market gaps.
Simplifying digital banking research, with FinTech Insights
We've designed FinTech Insights so it addresses these specific pain points.
Here's why using FinTech Insights for digital banking research is a better alternative to reading research reports and attempting to open accounts with your competitors:
- Wide coverage
FinTech Insights includes over 500,000 user journeys from banks and fintechs across the globe — North America, the UK, the EU, and even South America, Africa, and Asia.
This means you're not limited to the players operating in your market, but can learn from those with the best mobile banking features and user experiences, wherever they are in the world.
- Accuracy
Where reports can already be outdated on their publication date, FinTech Insights is always up to date.
We continually monitor the banks and fintechs on our platform and update our data weekly. So, when you review a specific bank or fintech's features or analyze a user journey, you can rest assured this is exactly what a customer would have access to and experience on that date.
- Completeness
We analyze every feature and user journey on every single platform where it's available. So if a bank has implemented a particular feature on their online portal, mobile app, and on wearables — for example, an iWatch app — you can see exactly how it's been implemented on all of these platforms.
More importantly, we've made the process of analyzing your competitors and evaluating the state of the market simple and effortless.
The comparisons page is designed to be intuitive and we present the data using graphs and other visual aids so it's easy to digest.
Using FinTech Insights to bring clarity to mobile banking feature development
So, how easy is it to find out exactly what you need to know to build market-leading mobile banking features using FinTech Insights?
With our common/uncommon features per category graph, it takes literal seconds. Say you wanted to find out which mobile banking features are the hardest to find in US incumbent banks' apps.
In the common/uncommon features per category graph, set the slider to 25%. You'll instantly be able to see which features are offered by 25% of your market. In the graph below, we can see the results for the US market.
Once you've obtained these results, you can dig deeper into specific feature categories to find out what they are, which of your competitors offer them, and even how common they are in the rest of the world.
The table below, for instance, shows that from the total of 38 features available in the money transfer category in the US market, the majority of these features are offered only by 3 or less banks, while there are 65 banks operating in other markets which already offer them.
Adding these features to your roadmap — FinTech Insights also enables you to study how different banks and fintechs have implemented them, so you can learn from them — would immediately put you in the category of banks and fintechs that rank best for money transfer capabilities.
You can carry out this exercise for any other feature, in the context of any market. For example, the table below shows that only three US banks offer particular card features, while 23 banks operating in the rest of the world offer them.
Here again, adding these features to your roadmap is a surefire way to improve your market position and provide your customers with a better user experience.
Give your customers the mobile banking features they crave
Research suggests 62% of digital deployments fail or fall short.
Why? In our view, it's simple.
Digital banking teams don't have access to complete, accurate, comprehensive digital banking research they can rely on.
And this means they have to take needless risks instead of focusing on making their mobile banking app and user experience the best they can be. It's high time that changed.
With FinTech Insights, you'll get access to the digital banking research you need to make data-backed choices and stay ahead of your competitors.
Book a FREE demo.
