10 Must-Have Features For A Successful Banking App

Speed and convenience are the two main features customers expect from any service they use today. Therefore, to better understand their customer needs and offer super-fast and high-quality customer service, many businesses launch their own digital apps and banks are no exception.

Providing their customers with a banking app is a new normal for banks and financial facilities today.

While more and more users are realizing the benefits of mobile banking apps and adopting the technology, banks have to keep up with the mobile development market trends to attract even more customers and retain those they already have.

In this article, we’ll look into the advantages mobile banking offers and what top mobile banking application features banks need to incorporate in their digital solutions to stay relevant in 2022.

Advantages of Mobile Banking to Customers

When launching their custom digital solutions, banks gain a variety of benefits from them. Banks can learn about their customers more and better plan their marketing campaigns, establish an end-to-end customer experience within the communication channel, decrease the cost of provided services, and much more. Meanwhile, banking apps also offer numerous advantages to their users, the most significant are:

• convenience – customers can check their bank account balances, perform financial transactions, deposit checks, and much more, avoiding the necessity to visit brick-and-mortar financial and banking facilities;
• speed – banking app users can instantly complete any finance-related tasks, all they need is just to log in into the app;
• pocket-bank – customers don’t need a desktop computer anymore; now, they can use all the banking services on their mobile devices while going to work or staying with their families;
• improved operation control – banking apps allow tracking the history of made transactions, quickly check balance, or they can send notifications e.g. on a pay-day or when money transfers were completed successfully;
• paper documents processing outside the banking facilities – many banking apps have integrated portable scanners that allow depositing checks or entering ID data without typing;
• personalization – bank app users can customize the apps to their needs, e.g. establish shortcuts to the most used services, set payment reminders, or even get better currency exchange rates for brand loyalty;
• cost-free – most banking apps are provided free of charge for bank customers.

10 Must-Have Features That Users Require

Mobile banking apps can significantly enhance customer experience with the bank. However, to maintain their services at a high level, banks need to constantly update their apps with the latest innovations emerging in the mobile development industry. Here are the top 10 mobile and online banking features that will be relevant in 2022.

1. Advanced Security & Fraud Alerts

Advanced security is never out of fashion, especially when it comes to mobile banking apps. A successful banking app requires strong security features that go further than just signing in with a PIN or a password. Besides being secure, a singing-in process also needs to be fast and easy. That’s why many businesses embed multi-factor authentication and biometrics in their apps.

Multi-factor authentication and biometrics are the most popular solutions for banking apps. Nevertheless, they can also be hacked by hackers. Here are some steps businesses can take to enhance their app security:

• implement PIN and password encryption and hashing;
• store PINs and passwords on a server instead of the source code;
• use storage facilities for cryptographic keys and certificates, e.g. Keychain for iOS and Keystore for Android;
• use two-factor authentication with SMS for outside app payments;
• limit the number of login attempts;
• start a new session every time a user logs into the app.

2. CORE Banking Features

A CORE banking system is a unified and centralized back-end platform that allows banks to quickly perform key banking activities, e.g. accessing bank accounts, processing transactions, updating user accounts and other financial records, performing customer relationship management (CRM), and others.

Many banks have adopted this system as it allows quickly fulfilling many banking operations and can handle a high volume of transactions, ensuring uninterrupted functioning of the banking products. The technology also helps banks to quickly establish partnerships with other FinTech companies and easily scale up and down their infrastructure.

3. QR Code Payments

QR technology is quickly spreading among diverse industries, including banking and retail. Now, customers can instantly purchase any product they like and do it contact-free, which is especially valuable in times of pandemics. For example, according to the recent QR payment surveys, one-third of Chinese customers are already making their payments with the help of QR codes, and the number of Chinese QR code transactions is expected to rise by 16.4% between 2020-2024, reaching $1,900 bln in 2023.

These are just some reasons why leading banks are embedding QR code scanning technology into their apps, giving more freedom to their customers and allowing them to choose preferable payment options. Find out more about QR payments and which major FinTech companies already use the technology in their apps.

4. Mobile Check Deposits

Traditional banking is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Mobile banking apps have already substituted many services provided in brick-and-mortar facilities, yet not all the services can be performed by digital solutions. Recently one more service became available digitally, banks have started offering online mobile check deposits.

The FinTech industry provides banks with portable scanners based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology for mobile check deposits. Using a mobile device camera and a portable scanner in the banking app, users can scan their checks and send the documents with a digital image and recognized text to their financial institution. The deposit data goes straight to the user’s account and they don’t have to spend half a day visiting a bank branch to perform this simple task.

5. Peer-to-Peer Payments

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payment is a convenient way to transfer funds to someone else’s account via a mobile app. Using this technology, users don’t need to withdraw cash from an ATM to