Revolutionising Banking: Top Methods For Innovating Mobile Banking Apps

As competition intensifies and customer expectations evolve, financial institutions must continually innovate their mobile banking apps to deliver exceptional user experiences. In this article, we will delve into a spectrum of strategies that banks can leverage to create innovative and user-centric mobile banking applications.

Modernised Mobile Banking Authentication: Building Trust Through Safety

Passwordless mobile banking has been an essential industry trend for years. Since banking apps are a common target for cybercriminals, owing in part to their containing sensitive and personal data, security is placed at the forefront of the development process for these particular software offerings. 

As one of the most innovative banking app features, biometric authentication helps enhance security by using biometric identification methods that cannot be easily replicated. This includes facial recognition, voice recognition, fingerprint reading, iris scanning, and more. Within the context of digital financial services, these biometric authentication features can not only be implemented in the login process but also when conducting money transfers.

Alongside this, AI algorithms can learn and adapt to variations in biometric traits, making biometric authentication processes even more accurate and secure. In the case of facial recognition, AI can facilitate computer-based facial recognition processes. By scrutinising facial attributes and afterwards comparing them against a database, AI simplifies the task of computerised facial recognition.

AI-based biometric authentication involves training ML models to recognise unique facial features. This allows AI-powered biometric authentication technologies to distinguish between real users and unauthorised agents. This is just one of the many reasons why biometric authentication has been regarded to be one of the most advanced digital security technologies available to us today.

Open Banking Emergence: The Future of Finance

To ensure your business stays competitive, it is crucial to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest fintech market trends. A well-informed approach to innovation can naturally aid in improving your financial products, which will in turn, help you attract more digital customers. 

One particular trend that many spend-savvy consumers have had their eye on in recent years is the concept of open banking. Simply put, open banking provides consumers the opportunity to securely share their financial data with ACCC-accredited third parties in order to enjoy third party financial products or even to move their financial data from one loan provider to another. 

Through the adoption of open banking for your bank or fintech company, you can transform your fundamental services to align more closely with the needs of your customer. This shift not only minimises complexities associated with payments and data acquisition, but can also help cultivate strong customer relationships, resulting in increased brand affinity, more customer engagement, and increased opportunities for future revenue generation.

Moreover, access to open banking data also simplifies the anti-money laundering (AML) investigation process, enabling banks to effectively identify suspicious transactions. In real cases, banks can access data from a reliable entity about any certain client, hence ensuring  AML compliance more effortlessly. Open banking also simplifies the know-your-customer (KYC) process, as financial institutions can easily access their user data for 90 days to verify customer information and account details.

Autonomous Testing Incorporation: Accelerating Development Cycles

Since the digital banking system is complicated, autonomous testing has emerged as an essential practice that holds the potential to revolutionise the way banking apps are developed and updated to meet high user expectations and security requirements. 

Banking app development is a continuous process marked by frequent updates, new features, and bug fixes. While traditional manual testing can lead to bottlenecks and delays, hindering the app’s time-to-market, autonomous testing brings the next-gen ways of testing software. Some advantages of autonomous testing include: 

• Drastically accelerates the testing process by running a multitude of test cases simultaneously, allowing developers to swiftly identify and address issues.
• Since accuracy is paramount in the world of banking apps, autonomous testing minimises the risk of human error, ensuring that critical functions like fund transfers, account management, and transactions are flawlessly executed.
• Provide extensive test coverage across different scenarios, configurations, and user journeys in banking apps, compared to automation testing.

AI-Powered Personalisation: Tailoring the Experience

AI is reshaping the banking landscape by enabling hyper-personalisation. Through AI algorithms, banks can analyse user data to understand spending patterns, saving behaviours, and financial goal-setting. This information allows the app to offer tailored recommendations and insights, empowering users to make informed financial decisions. 

A prominent example of this strategy is AI-powered chatbots. The conversation chatbots powered by AI in banking apps can handle customer queries, provide account information, assist with transactions, and even offer personalised recommendations for different contexts. By leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) and ML algorithms, these chatbots can understand customer intent and deliver accurate responses, same as Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. 

Additionally, by understanding customer behaviour, chatbots can offer tailor-made customer support and deliver real-time transaction alerts through push notifications, all intended to enhance customer experience. This feature can be used to do in-app marketing by recommending services for users based on their behavioural preferences.

Simple Yet Intuitive UI/UX Design: Catering to Modern User Expectations

The UI/UX of the banking app undoubtedly plays a critical role in determining its success. This is implemented in both B2C and B2B mobile apps. 

Financial institutions must invest in understanding their users’ needs, behaviours, and preferences. Conducting thorough user research and employing design thinking principles can yield insights into crafting intuitive and user-friendly interfaces. 

A minimalistic UI, for instance, facilitates swift and effective app usage for your target audience, while an intuitive UX enables them to grasp and use the app immediately. To provide a seamless user experience, you should consider these best practices for UI/UX design in banking apps:

• Streamlined navigation: You should arrange navigation elements logically, ensuring users can swiftly access their accounts, transactions, payments, and other essential features. A menu bar or tab layout can guide users intuitively through different sections of the app.

• Clear and cohesive layout: It’s essential to maintain a cohesive layout that presents information in a structured manner. Each screen of the banking app should have a clear purpose, guiding users without overwhelming them.

• User-centric content: You may think content is not related to design; however, clear explanations and concise labels guide users through processes, helping them understand banking operations with ease.

Banking App Updates Based on User Feedback: A Collaborative Approach

Innovation is a continuous journey that requires banks to adapt and evolve. Gathering user feedback and analysing app usage metrics are essential to identifying areas for improvement for your banking apps. Similarly, developing regular updates and feature enhancements driven by user input, are vital to maintaining an innovative edge. Some possible ways to gain insights into how users interact with your mobile app:

• Frequently analyse the review section in app stores:  Read user reviews of your app to find ideas to improve upon the digital platform, its features, and its overall user experience. 

• Incorporate analytics platforms for mobile apps: Utilising product analytics platforms enables you to assess the user journey within your app. This empowers you to prioritise crucial aspects, make prompt decisions, and enhance preparations for upcoming updates based on data-driven insights.

This feedback can be collected quarterly and reviewed by relevant stakeholders such as business analysts, developers, designers, and testers to determine which issues warrant immediate attention and which can be addressed over time. It’s also worth noting that app updates shouldn’t be a one-time endeavour. Banks should continuously gather user feedback, refine features, and fine-tune their app to align with evolving user expectations.

IT Trusted Partner Collaboration: Synergy In Innovation

Fintech companies often specialise in niche areas, such as AI-powered analytics, payment solutions, and investment platforms. As banks need to concentrate on core competencies and strategic initiatives, finding a dedicated software development team is worth considering to leverage their expertise and integrate cutting-edge technologies.

By offshoring banking app development and maintenance, banks can access skilled talents from various regions with diverse expertise. This enables you to develop high-quality, feature-rich banking apps that align with the latest industry trends and user expectations. This is particularly crucial in the fast-paced world of banking technology since the expertise of dedicated software teams can help banks:

• Delineate a mobile product roadmap.
• Have the right strategy to modernise banking apps with excellence delivery framework.
• Maintain faster development cycles by automating the testing process.
• Effectively bring new features or instant updates to the market by adopting new technologies and methodologies.
• Improve the internal development process with an advanced knowledge transfer process.

Level Up Your Mobile Banking Application

The global mobile banking app market is experiencing a rapid surge, and BFSI corporations are in the race to leverage the benefits of banking apps extensively to win competitive advantages.  By focusing on these strategies and embracing innovative features, banks and financial institutions can not only keep pace with the evolving demands of users, but also become pioneers in shaping the future of mobile banking.