While mobile banking helps create a more holistic customer
experience, it now seems the service is a vital aspect of customer acquisition.
Last month,The Financial Brandreported in
its "Mobile
Banking Now Vital to Customer Acquisition” that mobile banking is a
required feature for financial institutions today. FindABetterBank.com’s bank
comparison tool revealed that 18.3 percent thought that mobile banking is a
"must have” feature now, a 63 percent increase from 2010! Even more insightful
was the fact that more than 88 percent of survey respondents said they are
currently mobile banking users.
Are financial institutions keeping up with demand?The
Financial Brandarticle notes that in 2010, less than 30 percent of
the featured financial institutions offered a mobile banking app, compared to
more than 82 percent that offer the service now.
It seems many institutions agree that mobile banking is a
"must have” feature today, but we were curious to learn more. We asked NEFMA
member institutions, Dime Bank and Claremont Savings Bank, about how each
launched mobile technology — and the banks approached it quite differently.
Connecticut based, Dime Bank was an early adopter of the
technology, launching its mobile banking application in June of 2010. This
differentiated the bank from local competition — large and small — which were
not yet offering mobile services.
"Since we are always trying to add additional conveniences
that our customers want, we invested in the technology early on,” said Diane
Papadakos, Vice President, Director of Marketing & Sales at Dime Bank. "It
also helped us reach the younger generations who were most interested in the
service early on.”
To promote the launch of their app, Dime Bank used a
combination of in-branch signage, website messaging, statement stuffers,
Facebook posts and print and radio advertisements. Though some customers
embraced the app right from the start, a significant increase in users came in
April 2011 when Dime Bank launched its mobile website. In the two years since the
launch, the bank experienced a 1,073 percent growth rate in registered mobile
banking/app users.
"This is only the beginning. We anticipate our numbers may
triple in the coming years due to high demand and the increased number
smartphone users,” Papadakos said.
On the flip side is Claremont Savings Bank in N.H., which
just launched its first mobile banking application in February 2013 — a time
when 75 percent of their local competitors already offered it. Marketing
Coordinator, Jaime Richardson attributed the timing to the bank’s cautious and
customer-focused approach to banking.
"We took time to complete our due diligence,” said
Richardson. "We wanted to make sure that whatever functionality we offered
would be most useful to our customers.”
To promote its new service, Claremont Savings Bank focused
its efforts into a four-week, multi-pronged campaign of online advertising,
social media marketing, print and radio ads, as well as communications
in-branch and on automated teller machines. In July, the bank will make another
big push to secure mobile banking users as many students prepare to leave for
college or the workforce. Success of these campaigns will be measured in August
— and the bank has established a way to track its return on investment.
"Early on, we identified a percentage of customers who would
most likely use the product and evaluated Call Center communications to
determine who was looking for simple transactions that could be offered via a
mobile service,” said Richardson. "Then we attached a dollar amount to those
identified customers with a per transaction price, and this amount will be used
to determine ROI.”
ThoughThe Financial Brandstory didn’t
mention what features of mobile banking were "must have” for users today, the
banks we talked to have their own opinions, stemming from the fact that they
must stay up-to-date with customer demand. As a result, Dime Bank hopes to soon
offer bank-to-bank and person-to-person transfers, and Claremont Savings Bank
is exploring how to roll out mobile bill pay and mobile banking for business
account customers.