The Future of Fintech: Mobile Banking Trends to Follow
Not so long ago, banking and other industries, like healthcare, were associated with long lines and wasted lunch breaks. For some people, it still is, though digitalization is steadily changing our banking routine. The industry felt the benefits of tech solutions and their efficiency so the rise of Fintech has no reason to slow down.
Fintech includes all innovative digital solutions aimed at optimizing banking and other financial procedures. Online and mobile banking provides customers with the freedom to manage their funds, bills, and bank accounts whenever they want which became extremely helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Statista projected the total transaction value to grow from $4.1 trillion in 2019 to $6.6 trillion in 2021, and at the beginning of the 21st-century people were still suspicious that this sort of innovation would work.
How Did Banking Get Along With Technology?
High-speed mobile Internet and tech invasion in our lives have sped up the growth of mobile banking and the evolution of mobile banking technologies. Digitalization isn’t some fancy feature anymore, now it is almost a must-have that allows companies to stand afloat. Fintech, like many other industries, is taking part in a constant race of customers’ expectations. Not that all those innovations haven’t benefited the industry overall.
Financial institutions turn to mobile banking apps development to provide a seamless banking experience. To foolproof they succeeded, let’s outline the benefits of combining the mobile app with banking services:
Secure Access
Unlike your typical mobile app, banking apps are way more secure. Typical email and password are usually not enough, so banking apps use multi-level authentication that includes two or more security set-ups for users to go through, e.g. password, pin code, and some biometric identification to the very least. To reduce the risk of forgery, an account gets connected to a smartphone so you and the bank get notified if someone else is trying to log in.
Convenience
Being able to carry out and manage banking operations from the comfort of your home is not only convenient, but it is also kind of precious since it saves customers time which they can spend on their hobbies or families. Besides, most mobile banking operations are available anytime and do not have a closing time.
More Control Over Finances
Mobile banking allows customers to track and control their finances way more efficiently since it is easy to access statements and balance and be fully aware of what is going on. There is no need to search the closest bank branch or ATM to check or recheck their status. Customers can easily stay on top of daily transactions to protect against fraud.
Fewer Errors
Neatly made mobile banking apps eliminate lots of errors prone to occur because of a human factor. It can also reduce mistakes made by customers.
Banks also benefit from providing their services through mobile apps since:
- Transactions cost less;
- They can advance marketing campaigns;
- Distribution is expanded;
- Mobile banking is a tool to increase customers’ loyalty;
- They receive additional ways to access operations, services, and products.
Eco-friendly
Since customers do not need to make their way to the physical bank branch, use cars or other vehicles, and all the operations do not require paper usage; mobile banking contributes to helping the planet’s ecology and saving valuable resources.
These are the key benefits of any mobile banking application that you can cover with an MVP. Yet, as was mentioned above, customers will probably expect more (and then some more repeatedly), e.g., personalized experience or unclogged customer journey. Industry pioneers invest in advanced technologies and follow the latest mobile and mobile banking trends to seize more opportunities.
2021: Mobile Banking Trends
Innovating customer experience and gaining an edge over competitors are two key reasons banks invest in the development of new technological solutions. So here are the recent trends in mobile banking:
Blockchain
Blockchain is famous for the way it preserves and handles data, making it a perfect choice for mobile banking. This technology can make payments faster and security stronger. As a bonus, it requires less human involvement during processing, thus fewer fees.
Blockchain-based payment channels are decentralized, so fraud risks are reduced, and they enable data transparency. Basically, blockchain is an ideal addition to improve the quality of mobile banking procedures.
Chatbots and Machine Learning
Today, most chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which means they can provide a more natural and personalized user experience and are integrated with other systems and platforms. Chatbots can help with a variety of tasks, starting with interactive FAQs to some basic customer relation management (CRM). Also, chatbots can serve as 24/7 customer support, and customer support is highly important.
The best thing about chatbots is that they can learn. They do so mainly through interaction with humans, but that’s not the only option. Chatbots also collect so-called training data and can be connected to open source data (like WikiQA Corpus or Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus) to create a fuller picture.
Besides, developers can tune chatbots to collect and analyze data on customer satisfaction. It provides banks with awareness of pain points, so it is possible to fix them until all the customers are lost.
Big Data
Banks and financial institutions use big data to prevent fraudulent activities and improve customers’ data security. Customers generate a vast amount of data that can be gathered and analyzed, starting from their banking history and to their social media accounts. Mainly, it gives banks an understanding of common usage patterns so when those patterns are disrupted, banks can even lock down customers’ accounts until the reasons for sudden changes have been clarified.
Voice Payment
Voice-powered devices are as trendy as ever. Since they are doing well and used for biometric authentication, it is time for some advancements — namely, voice payment. SDK.finance even claimed that trend to be the new revolution in Fintech and, according to their research, 28% of voice assistants’ users have already made voice payments at some point of their customer journey.
Smart assistants already allow users to use their voices to make various purchases and operations. For example, Siri can help transfer money between accounts and Google Assistant to shop from nearby stores. So what stops banks from reaping the benefits from such a feature?
Mobile Apps
We live in a world where you expect almost everything possible to be mobile. Not having a mobile app for banks and financial institutions seems a bit conservative. It may not be a full-fledged ‘packet bank’ but at least some sort of pay-down app or app that allows customers to use the ATM without a need to fumble with physical credit cards.
- The pay-down apps are special mobile banking apps that round up customers’ purchases and send the difference either on a deposit account or to pay the credit debt. Such apps can also include features that help customers to monitor their debts and build some strategies to pay them off.
- The app for cardless ATM usage is an app that uses innovations in near-field communications technology and QR code scanning to provide customers with a possibility to use ATMs just by being close to an ATM or by scanning their phone screen.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we took a brief trip and explored some recent trends that will flood Fintech (some of those already exist in their simplest forms), so you could get an idea of where to look for in case a need to innovate your financial business arises. Potentially, each of the mentioned trends can help any business in the financial industry to improve their key performance indicator (KPI), e.g., lower customer churn, increase ROI or refine customer loyalty.
If you have questions about the future of mobile banking or need to adapt your business to ever-changing mobile banking market demands, the Onix team is here to help. Contact us now and let’s together bring a bit of future into your business.
