Earlier last week a study was released by Mitek that ranked fifteen of the world’s banks from best to worst in one teeny tiny category: customer experience with the banks’ mobile deposit features.
In this one category—which was somehow broken down into 51 sub -categories when the data was analyzed—Capital One emerged as first on the list, while Regions Bank was listed at fifteenth, in last place. Why?
Broadly, the answer is user experience, but specifically, according to Futurion CEO Jim Van Dyke (formerly of the consultancy Javelin Stratgey & Research), the answer is fees.
“[The banks] who are ranked the lowest for mobile deposit are the ones who are charging for it,” says Van Dyke. “People just won’t go along with being charged for something digital, especially if that something is free at a branch.”
If you are familiar with banking, or, you know, a human who uses banks, chances are you are familiar with the world’s overall feelings about banking fees: collectively, as a global society, they’re hated.
Of course, the monsters under the bed that keep finance professionals up at night, clutching their updated APIS to their chests—millennials—happen to hate them just a little more than other demographics.
This is why it shouldn’t be a surprise that the banks who charge fees were ranked last by the report—the surprise is that there are still banks who do it.
U.S. Bank charged for realtime payment settlement via clearXchange until recently. When they stopped doing so (the side-by-side comparison with Bank of America, who didn’t charge, looked bad) they removed the argument for many banks to charge for, well, anything. Banks’ desperation to make money from fees led to Wells Fargo’s recent troubles.
And if you are going to have a fee for something like mobile deposit (which means you are essentially charging customers to take pictures of their checks) then the rest of your banking app needs to be more than perfect; it pretty much needs to be the Mona Lisa of banking apps. Developers should look at it and weep.
Which isn’t the case for Regions Bank; according to Van Dyke, this was also a bank that had a high percentage of customers use the mobile deposit feature once and abandon it forever, because problems with the auto-capture of the feature and problems with the app’s overall flow turned it into a “frustrating process [for the user].”
“I think people are looking for value,” says Van Dyke, regarding what customers want from a bank. “They want fairness, to be treated well.”
To learn more about mobile banking, join us at Bank Innovation Israel this November 1-3 in Tel Aviv. Learn more and register here.