8 mobile banking trends for 2023
More and more people are turning to digital solutions for their financial needs.
Developers and marketers of finance and banking apps have responded quickly to new consumer behaviors, and in this post, we’ll look at fascinating trends in the mobile banking industry.
Read on for examples of mobile banking apps, reasons why finance went mobile in the first place, and a deep dive into the latest trends driving digital transformation at financial institutions.
3 examples of top-notch mobile banking apps
Before we dive in and analyze some of the trends in banking of 2023, let’s examine a few examples of the best mobile banking apps and digital financial services.
EveryDollar
EveryDollar is one of the most popular personal finance apps in the consumer fintech space. It starts by digitizing Dave Ramsey’s philosophy on budgeting into a beautifully designed interface. Still, it also helps consumers activate the saving portion of their process by (optionally) automatically rounding up transactions and investing the remainder in a low-cost ETF.
PicPay
PicPay is Brazil’s most prominent digital wallet, with over 60 million users. To facilitate more transactions and give its users a better experience, PicPay chose to add robust messaging capabilities into its app. By surrounding mobile payments with advanced messaging options, PicPay can provide users with a more engaging and social experience that adds context and delight to each transaction.
Mercury
Mercury is an online banking platform (with no physical locations) that offers free business checking and savings accounts tailored to startups. One of the standout features of Mercury is that it offers access to its API so developers can set up their accounts with some nifty automation custom to their business model. The app is packed with more digital tools, including generating virtual cards, editing spending limits, freezing a card, and adding it to mobile wallets.
Why finance went mobile
It would be easy to say that finance went mobile because everything else went mobile, too, but there are some core reasons for the increase in mobile banking.
Convenience
The convenience factor of banking and payment apps are fairly obvious but are still revolutionary for the traditional banking industry, considering people were still balancing checkbooks manually just 20 years ago, and therefore worth mentioning:
24/7 access to financial data on the go (balances, mobile payments, transactions, etc.)
Peer-to-peer payments (no more split checks)
Digital wallets for contactless payments
Deposit checks with photos
Just to name a few.
Increase in cashless transactions
The amount of cashless transactions worldwide is increasing exponentially. In 2021, $440 billion USD was transacted in the Asia-Pacific region, $254 billion in Europe, and $204 billion in North America.
This is expected to grow past $2.1 trillion globally by 2026, including significant growth in Latin America.
Control over expenses
According to a European study, 35% of respondents checked their bank account balance with a mobile app at least once per week, while 11% claimed they check balances via mobile several times daily.
Instant access to balance data helps consumers stay on top of their spending and potentially avoid overdraft fees.
Now let’s zoom out and look at the trends driving mobile banking you can use to enhance your product in 2023.
Mobile banking trends to improve your finance app in 2023
Here are the top trends in mobile banking this year.
1. Security first
Convenience in mobile banking is nice to have. Security is a must-have for banks and financial services apps. A biometric authentication process can provide both security and convenience. Rather than forget a pin or password — or potentially have them stolen — biometric login features increase security while being more convenient.
Soon, however, more financial institutions will look to implement a “Know Your Customer (KYC)” login process using artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud space, and data to provide a login process that is both highly secure and frictionless. By ‘learning’ about consumers' financial transactions with this method, banks can also provide timely offers for other mobile banking services like loans, credit cards, and lines of credit.
2. Elimination of cards
Retailers everywhere are moving toward contactless payment kiosks. In 2021, the global market size for contactless payment was valued at $34.55 billion and is expected to grow by 19% by 2030. The payment process is faster than cash or card and is supported by the proliferation of digital wallets.
In addition to contactless payment at retailers, banks now offer cardless ATM withdrawals, which could very well be the standard method in a few years. Bank of America allows you to connect your debit card to your digital wallet and use its network of ATMs for cash withdrawals.
3. Personalization
Personalization affects the mobile banking experience in two key ways: user experience and customer experience.
An example of mobile banking user experience innovation is using dashboards and shortcuts. If somebody uses a particular feature of an app every day, the ability to ‘pin’ that feature to a dashboard allows them to conduct their tasks quicker and easier. According to Keynova’s Mobile Banker Scorecard study, 41% of financial institutions allow users to personalize their dashboards.
The second way personalization can improve digital banking is through customer experience. Apps like Dave Ramsey’s Every Dollar allow you to set custom budgets and savings goals, then watch as they visually ‘fill up’ your accounts. As your savings account grows, apps can push out notifications of offers for financial services you’re now qualified for.
4. Messaging
What’s the difference between starting a chat on your phone vs. making a mobile payment? From a UX perspective, there’s little difference — you type characters into a screen and hit the send button. The important distinction is that financial ‘chats’ must be a bit more structured — they need to flow linearly from expected outcome to confirmation smoothly and directly with no unexpected left turns the way a conversation might go.
App developers like WeChat and Facebook Messenger understood this and seamlessly baked mobile payments into their chat apps.
Zooming out, you can see that conversational banking is the future. Financial institutions that can replicate the customer service of human tellers with their mobile products will win customers from those that don’t.
5. No code/Low code development
Speed to market is critical for app development, but so is quality. No code/low code tools allow you to have both. And the secret is out — by 2024, 65% of all application development will use some low-code tool.
For example, let’s say you wanted to add conversational banking to your product strategy. Building it from scratch is time-consuming; your team will likely learn everything quickly and be more prone to mistakes. Using the Sendbird API would allow you to implement several high-impact features with just a few lines of code. Features include:
User-to-user and business-to-user chat
Identity-based transactions
Customer support
Notifications
See more low-code tools developed specifically for fintech companies here.
6. Modern UI, easy-to-use UX
Ten years ago, no developer would want their product to resemble a boring financial app from a UI perspective. Mobile applications like Quickbooks have industry-leading UI and UX to the point that you can run a small business's finances entirely from smartphones or tablets. While the mobile experience differs from the desktop, it is a complete match in features and functionality.
7. AI-supported customer service
The gold standard metric for customer service is time to resolution. Customers (and businesses) want their issues fixed quickly and with as few touches as possible — they don’t particularly care if it’s a human or a computer helping them so long as the problem is resolved ASAP.
Chatbots powered by AI and machine learning have made incredible advancements in 2023 and can be better suited to solve most online banking issues than humans. Expect this type of AI-supported chat to get even better in the coming months and years, potentially becoming one of the critical factors in the future of mobile banking.
8. Mobile financial services
We touched on this earlier with the examples from EveryDollar, but it’s worth pointing out that apps that help you manage your debt and grow your savings are on the rise.
Traditional banking interfaces don’t really encourage you to pay down your debt or contribute to your savings account; they keep track of the bottom line in a traditional ledger format. Contrast that with Everydollar, which illustrates Dave Ramsey’s snowball debt payoff method with — you guessed it — an actual snowball that fills up your phone screen with your financial data. The app also provides tools like a debt calculator to help consumers create a plan.
Look for financial institutions to adopt these features into their banking applications to help people manage their money better, thus creating a stickier experience that facilitates people to spend more time with their mobile banking products.
The only UIKit you need.
Using Sendbird to elevate your fintech products
If you want to turn your financial transactions into a lasting relationship with your customers, adding a robust messaging strategy to your product is the first step. Check out our financial services solutions page to learn more about our offerings for secure in-app communication for trusted customer relationships and a lot more!
Ready to get started with Sendbird? Try for free for 30 days or talk with our sales team.
