News

Consumers expect ease of use, security from bank's mobile app

June 13, 2017

Retail bank and credit card customers now prefer mobile to all other channels, but rate ease of use as a differentiator among top-performing mobile apps. Additionally, a study by J.D. Power finds, data security remains an obstacle to takeup by new customers.

J.D. Power 2017 U.S. Banking App and U.S. Credit Card App Satisfaction studies measure overall satisfaction with mobile banking and credit card applications based on five factors. In order of importance, these are ease of navigation; appearance; clarity of information; range of services; and availability of key information, a press release said.

"Even with the mobile channel having the highest satisfaction and consistency of all channels, adoption is stubbornly low — particularly when compared with overall smartphone penetration," Bob Neuhaus, director of financial services at J.D. Power, said in the release. "The challenge for both retail banks and credit card companies is to establish accessible entry points that ease resistant customers onto the mobile channel where they will, in all likelihood, quickly find that they are very satisfied with the experience."

Key findings from the study:

• ease of use or navigation is the most heavily weighted driver of satisfaction. Features most commonly associated with ease of use included login process, access to account information and overall ease of managing the account. Fingerprint login, streamlined access to account balances and account transfer are important variables in a successful banking or credit card app;
• just 31 percent of retail bank customers and 17 percent of credit card customers use mobile apps. One obstacle is trust — fewer than half of respondents (44 percent for bank customers, 46 percent for credit card customers) perceive their online information to be "very secure" and just 32 percent of bank customers say they trust mobile banking; and
• more than two-thirds (69 percent) of study participants have used a mobile payment service in the past 30 days. This number jumps to 76 percent among millennial and Gen Z consumers.

Capital One ranked highest in overall satisfaction in the retail bank category with a score of 870 out of 1,000. Bank of America scored 865 and TD Bank scored 860. Highlighting tight competition in the mobile app space, the highest and lowest ranked performers were separated by only 32 index points separates the highest-ranked and lowest-ranked performers in the study.

Discover ranks highest in overall satisfaction in the credit card category with a score of 895. Capital One scored 888 and Barclaycard scored 886.

The 2017 U.S. Banking App and U.S. Credit Card App Satisfaction studies are based on responses from 5,564 retail bank and credit card customers nationwide. The studies were fielded in April and May.