India's Icici Bank has launched an app store where customers can view all of the bank's mobile banking services in one place.
The launch of the app store comes as the bank rolls out three new mobile banking applications, enabling customers to initiate a host of transactions before visiting a branch, connect with a bank agent over video cal,l and view their transactions over the last 30 days.
The app store is designed to give users an aggregate view of all of the bank's mobile banking applications for easy selection, download and upgrade of apps.
It's an approach which is recommended by analyst house Gartner, which contends that explosive growth of apps is causing significant challenges for the banking industry, as the visibility of customer banking apps in public stores decreases as more third party applications come online. The firm forecasts that within the next two years, 25% of the top 50 global banks will have launched a banking app store to improve app discovery, user experience and collaboration.
Icici launched the country's first mobile banking application, 'iMobile' in 2008 and now claims a quarter of market share by value of transactions among the country's banks. In June, it became the first bank to cross the milestone of Rs 1000 crore worth of transactions in a month.