Chase and la Caixa top mobile banking study; HSBC bottom of the pile

Chase has topped Forrester Research's mobile banking rankings, with Spain's la Caixa proving Europe's top dog and HSBC trailing badly at the bottom of the table.

  17 2 comments

Chase and la Caixa top mobile banking study; HSBC bottom of the pile

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Forrester put the mobile services of 15 major banks from around the world through their paces, judging them on the range of touch-points for access; the enrolment and login process; money management services; transactional features; service features; cross-channel functionality; sales services; and usability.

Out of 100, the banks scored an average of 56 points, with US giant Chase leading the pack on 71. Chase scored particularly well - 86 out of 100 - on transactional functionality, thanks to useful contextual options such as the ability to add a payee for P2P payments by importing the customer's contacts from their phone.

La Caixa is ranked second in the table, scoring 67 points, with an impressive 88 out of 100 in the range-of-touch-points category thanks to native mobile and tablet apps across four operating systems: Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, and Windows Phone.

In June, La Caixa will host MobeyDay - a mobile banking event organised by Finextra and the Mobey Forum - in Barcelona.

Bank of America and Wells Fargo both score a respectable 63 points, With Citi on 61, Dutch giant Rabobank 59 and Deutsche Postbank 58.

However, UK banks are lagging behind their international colleagues, with NatWest the top ranked Brit on 57 points, ahead of Barclays on 54 and HSBC on a woeful 25 points, a score which takes into account zero out of 100 for transactional features.

On average, the 15 banks score best on offering a range of touch-points (71 out of 100) and account information and management (67) but poorly on service features (34) and sales and acquisition (eight).

Peter Wannemacher, analyst, Forrester, says: "The most obvious missed opportunity among the 15 banks reviewed by Forrester is that few are making effective use of context to make information more relevant to customers. Sales is another big missed opportunity: Some banks aren't even trying to cross-sell products and services through mobile, and none of the 15 does it effectively."

Sponsored [Webinar] Reaping the benefits of Hyper-Personalisation with AI and Application Modernisation

Comments: (2)

Alvin Lim

Alvin Lim VP Head Consumer eBusiness at Citibank

I think the last point about cross-selling on mobile is valid but at the same time can be debated if it's an effective channel.

Mobile is good for "quick" use enabling customers to access their financial at their fingertip i.e. viewing to simple transactions.

However, if mobile also includes tablet (or maybe phablet), the behavior can be different simply because it's "less" mobile per se. Users are more on discovery, ready to spend sometime for reading, engaging or interacting with information.

Tablet (phablet) probably is a better channel to drive cross-selling on mobile. But to what extend, that's a new challenge.

Your thoughts?

A Finextra member 

I am not too sure of that. This is pretty new ground for the big Banks because they don't seem to be able to change. However the ability to provide 'useful' apps for Banking, or more importantly payment services, is definitely not new. A simple app with geo-couponing, account management and wallet services plugged together is all possible. 

Why are they lagging? Well, having worked with some of the biggest I believe one of the main reasons is simple organisational paralysis. The matrix is so complex, delivering any new channel/platform with capabiliy means signing off any number of stakeholders.

So I think the technology is there for any channel. The internal thinking is there for many. However good old fashioned management hierarchies, panic re-organisations and redundancies stifle innovation and real change.

Too busy reorganising deck chairs to watch out for icebergs is one analogy.

[Webinar] Reaping the benefits of Hyper-Personalisation with AI and Application ModernisationFinextra Promoted[Webinar] Reaping the benefits of Hyper-Personalisation with AI and Application Modernisation