Mobile apps have taken many industries by quiet storm in recent years, as a massive shift toward smartphone ownership has produced a heretofore nonexistent market which any business would be well-advised to follow.
Businesses stand to benefit a great deal from embracing mobile apps, for a number of obvious reasons in the case of paid apps, but the loss-leading mobile apps that many businesses develop simply to popularize their site or service can be highly effective as well. Mobile banking is one such area, in which clients will have yet another avenue by which to judge the quality of a business, and the business another avenue with which to satisfy their customers.
Mobile apps can add a great deal of convenience to a customer’s day, in a number of ways. Firstly, the simple fact that a client need not type in the browser URL is a significant advantage, despite its mere seconds in actual time savings. But businesses should of course remember that any customer with a mobile phone, smart or otherwise, cares quite a bit about convenience, and facilitating such ease will likely garner a fair amount of customer appreciation. The one-click application launch is the sort of thing that will increase customer use of the service itself, which will lead to customers happily aware at all times of how much money remains in the account, and so on (though in some cases banks realize they can make more money by disabling such awareness).
Beyond mere convenience lies the advantage of simplifying the graphical interface, which allows far easier navigation and generally eases usage of the service, which is useful in and of itself, but when banks can reduce the amount of data they send back and forth between themselves and their users they can lower the cost of operating their servers; a paltry amount, perhaps, but scalable over millions of users, and potentially significant. While mobile-only sites can ease the stress a bit, they still can’t match the simplicity of the fact that the app stores most of the graphical data on the phone to begin with.
Another underrated advantage is in fact security; although many people believe that their online banking accounts might be more susceptible to problems if their phone is lost or stolen, this is easily protected through password protection, which is just as safe as any other password-protection system, except for the fact that, on a large family of devices, there are far fewer malicious pieces of software available, on the iOS devices in particular. Human approval has a way of reducing the potential for spyware and other dangerous software from finding its way onto a machine than the open system that makes up both traditional computers as well as certain mobile devices, Android in particular.
Oddly enough, the potential for customer satisfaction is confusingly high; a few other banks, such as BNZ, have seen their apps rise to upper chart echelons. It just goes to show that a well-designed program can be exceedingly popular, even if nothing more than utilitarian. Other banks which have jumped on board represent a laundry list of the entire industry, from Halifax to Bank of America to Bankwest and others.
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