Customer acceptance of mobile banking apps and mobile banking services is on an all-time high by both existing and emerging economies. However, the impact of a good user experience is often underestimated. Research points out that nearly half the millennial customers are dissatisfied with mobile banking and online banking services. With increasing dependency on mobile banking apps should be a signal for banks to rethink their mobile banking design. The digitization teams responsible for mobile strategy will have to include user experience as a value-adding differentiator to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

A recent study on user experience for mobile banking revealed that there is a correlation between user experience and mobile banking. It states that these two needs to go hand in hand to increase adoption and usage numbers, especially in the developing countries.

Emerging economies are utilizing mobile banking and hybrid-online payments services to empower the bottom of the pyramid (BoY) population with financial inclusion. With over 3.9 billion BoY population worldwide ( 95% – South Asia, 68% Middle-East & Africa, and 27% Latin America). A mobile banking app with a combination of high functionality and good UX design can assist in tapping the potential banking market. (Statistics source – PwC)

Given the reason, it is imperative that a good UX experience is crucial for mobile banks to be used and appreciated by its customers.

Here are 5 ways to improve user experience for mobile banking:-

Make security a top priority

It is quite a challenge to create a secure, yet user-friendly mobile banking app on two of the major mobile operating systems – Android and iOS) since both are completely different. Balancing security with a good UX is pivotal. Recent times has seen a surge in mobile banking trojans which topped the threats related to mobile banking. Although incorporating a multi-factor authentication can be easy, user’s response is not favorable. Almost 74% customers hated two-factor authentication to sign in.

One way of addressing this security issue can by introducing either fingerprint or voice or facial recognition technology. This biometric technology analyzes physical characteristics and behavioral patterns. This allows for a new level of security and usability by solving user friction and security lapses. Nevertheless, it is good when developers adopt a “security first” philosophy when it comes to UX design.

Bankable integration of legacy systems and customer interface

Almost 66% of customers who use mobile banking regularly demand easier and faster services that many legacy banking institutions are straining to deliver, mainly due to the true integration of the back-end systems and manual process with the front-end systems. This lack of proper integration sets back the digital transformation goals of banking and financial organizations by large measures. Not surprisingly, 50% shareholders responsible for digital transformation, in a recent survey have said that legacy systems are one of the biggest barriers to making the transformation take effect.

The current approach of integration is done by building a layer of applications around the legacy systems to provide a customer interface because a 360-degree transformation would involve replacing or extensively upgrading the existing back-end systems. For the future, the usage of a middleware – a Java or a PHP based backend to converse between legacy systems and mobile apps.

Another option would be to implement Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), through cloud computing. Even a hybrid integration, can connect legacy systems to internal applications and third-party applications through APIs.

Incorporate emerging technologies to enhance services

With evolving technology such as AI and machine learning, mobile banks applications will touch new degrees of sophistication especially with voice and facial biometrics, along with growing confidence in the beneficial nature of chatbots.

It is predicted that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based. These voices searched are predicted to be carried out by voice-enabled assistants powered by AI. Voice-enabled AI can perform searches and even initiate payments. The voice-controlled mobile application is already a reality. For example, the Royal Bank of Canada added Siri to their mobile app.

Many banks have already given a go-ahead to facial and image technology. The mobile user interface and core banking systems are connected via an Enterprise Content Management System. The inclusion of facial biometric technology as a part of user experience can ensure significant time savings and increased productivity.

Banking chatbots are enjoying widespread acceptance, so much so that by 2020, 85% customer interaction with banks will be through chatbots. Developing a conversation UI for chatbots can lead to high engagement and lower abandonment rate. Some uses of chatbot can extend beyond customer support and recommendations. For example, American Express (AmEx) employs chatbots that can identify and terminate credit card fraud.

Personalized Services to improve satisfaction

The power of personalization services through mobile banking apps has not yet plateaued. This includes both UX and content personalization. A UX personalization would involve allowing users to customize home screens, choose colors and increase or decrease font sizes. With additional how-to-guides and quick access to customer support (help buttons) would assist customers who prefer self-service. Through content personalization, geo-fence based notifications or reminders can be sent to customers when customers in near the vicinity of the bank. This location-based user experience design in real-time can increase the app engagement by 2x times.

Personalization experience can also be included in the form of budgeting tools, financial advisors for investment wisdom and even for scheduling appointments for VIP customers. AI integrated design can perform these functionalities with ease. It can also be used to extract data and financial records to cross-sell products to the right customer at the right time.

Minimize effort with streamlined navigation and reduced customer input

A good mobile banking design should ideally include proper navigation and instant redirects to point the customers to the content they are looking for. With landmarks and icons, such as search boxes, section navigation tools and labels in the app, it can appear intuitive whilst simple to use. Although, identifying where the customer is getting lost in the navigation process through touch heat maps can be used to rectify the problem areas. It is also a good guideline to tell the customer which screen they are looking at by highlighting the respective icon.

A mobile banking app that avoids demanding too much effort from the customer is the first to pleasing the customer. By automatically populating data or setting up defaults for repetitive actions can greatly reduce customer effort and errors. Auto-suggestion, spell-check and predictive text, without overdoing, can bring down the time spent on data entry.

For banks aiming to delight their mobile banking population, it is crucial to deliver high-quality user experience. In the long run, a great user experience will likely be a good pay off by increasing revenue through elevated customer satisfaction levels and by boosting customer loyalty. Also, in the future, AI will become instrumental in bringing a refined user experience in the mobile banking applications.

How do Microservices Enable Innovation/Progress in the Adoption of Cloud?

Cloud enables scaling as per requirements

Moving business processes to the cloud is one of the major infrastructure changes for the businesses of today. It requires transferring applications to the cloud environment from their legacy environment.

A few years ago, companies that were considering moving workloads to cloud environments were in two minds about the feasibility of the cloud environment. At that time, the bigger question was whether the feasibility factor would force a vast migration from legacy environments to the cloud architecture. However, the cloud migration did not happen on a massive scale as the Y2K migration from one environment to another. Businesses considered it to be too risky and a painful investment to move the workloads. But as time changed, companies have now widely accepted both private and public cloud due to the rising costs and need for continuous, uninterrupted implementation.

Most businesses choose to put new functionality into the cloud environment, usually in a public cloud. This is generally done by purchasing SaaS applications instead of traditional software. The new development is then done in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud environment.  The challenge nowis not data migration but working towards keeping data within premises, and exposing it for better digitalization through cloud-based microservices.

How do microservices fit into this scenario?

Microservices are often confused with the traditional SOA-type services. Though there is a definite overlap, microservices is an architectural pattern in which composite applications are made up of small, independent processes that work in coordination with each other using language-agnostic APIs.

This process not only facilitates the migration of applications from legacy to cloud, but also helps overcome challenges posed by regulations such as GDPR which require greater accountability with regard to data storage. In the last seven years, most businesses have deployed 60-80% of their current applications, and they continue to re-implement the applications as the new software versions are launched.

With no data being stored the microservices layer, there is limited persistence. And thereby, only one source of data instead of multiple sources.

Addressing the challenge of re-engineering the legacy environment

Many third-party service providers admonish that they will have to re-engineer their legacy environment and implement it into the cloud architecture to get the desired end-to-end performance of the applications. While this process is happening in some enterprises, it’s very selective. Most companies prefer to have a cloud-based microservices layer, which allows fulfilling the need to re-implement and enables moving legacy applications only when their underlying functionality alters enough or new versions become available in a SaaS or cloud version.

Another factor that keys into the cloud migration strategy is the limited capital. That’s why business units want new functionality and see little or no gain in investing capital, time and risk against replicating existing functionality that works into a new environment.

Therefore, instead of making a significant investment in a quick migration like the Y2K movement, businesses are making considerable investments in APIs and microservices. This aids hybrid environments (combination of legacy and cloud) to work well together.

However, this move doesn’t imply that companies won’t have to redevelop a few of their applications in the cloud. But it gives them the option of selecting which ones they wish to redevelop.

How does moving to cloud increase the efficiency of microservices?

The microservices architecture provides a great deal of benefits such as strong subsystem boundaries, independent implementation, technological diversity, and so on. But it becomes complex with distributed application development. Having said that, it is important to note that running a host of distributed applications at scale is a difficult task, even with proper tools and design. It needs a system that has a stable feature set with a well-known system load. For instance, this system can be simply lifted and shifted onto the cloud and the benefits of cloud computing still remain the same.

Moving to the cloud platform helps in managing the health and lifecycle of microservices. Cloud makes it easier by handling much of the operational complexity caused by distributed application development. It makes it easier to scale the application when there is an increased demand, watches out for unhealthy instances, describes services interacting with each other, and more.

A well-deployed cloud infrastructure has a significant impact on the overall performance of the microservices application. In the instances where the microservices are composed using a classic synchronous mechanism (blocking calls, each waiting for downstream calls to return), probable performance problems appear due to the increased call-chain size. A more competent mechanism is to use an asynchronous protocol, such as JMS or any other enterprise-messaging protocol/tool (IBM MQ, MSMQ, and others) to deploy the microservices. With this approach, businesses can ensure that there are no bottlenecks in the final application system since most of the communication is through non-blocking asynchronous calls. Whereas blocking, synchronous calls are restricted to things like user-interactions. A simple rule to abide by is to avoid as many blocking calls as possible.

The implementation of microservices-based API seems to address the loopholes that arise out of monolithic SOAs. But at the same time, it is imperative to have a properly configured cloud deployment and people who can best leverage this new model to realize the complete potential of microservices. Unless this happens, there’s no possibility of exploring the full benefits of the cloud.

Agile is not just about stand up meetings and sprints. To deliver superior quality of work to clients, the mindset in the organization across all layers should be flexible and open to embrace change. Agile needs to be looked at as a mindset rather than a set of tools and processes.

The way the team responds to a changes, impediments; and delivers value to the client in small timeboxes as fast as possible, to fetch continuous feedback, is a part of an Agile mindset.

The below article looks at how organizations must shift our practice-based mindsets to more behavior-based mindsets. This will allow organizations to leverage the “Agile” behaviors of collaboration and discovery, to produce valuable outcomes that move business organizations forward.

An Agile mindset focuses not just on the completion of the task. It lays more prominence on the value a certain task is going to bring to the end users. This is the reason why Agile is based on receiving continuous constructive feedback. Cultivating and nourishing this mindset, will result in amazing results – happy employees delivering great value and making clients excited with the results.

It is not just the tools or the certifications that bring about the Agile change, but more importantly the mindset and outlook of the organization which plays a pivotal role in Agile transformation.

Companies are looking forward to better ways and technologies to improve their productivity and efficiency. They can achieve this by bringing about a transformation in the mindset internally towards Agile, and also finding an experienced and expert service provider with Agile DNA.

Finding the right fit

Organization looking for Agile service provider need to take stock of where they are currently and what they want to achieve using Agile delivery models.

Backlog based delivery model – Release and iteration planning can be made easier with a well prioritized  backlog  which results in clear indication of what the service provider intends to spend time on – including the internal work that the customer might not notice. This helps in setting expectation with the stakeholders, especially when there are additional or change in requirements.

Automation using open source tools – There are certain impediments like cost, quality and coverage that might limit the expansion of automation. So it is important to have right set of open source tools and more importantly to have an automation framework in place, to succeed with test automation. The service provider with an agile DNA will exactly put the above points in place for their clients to reap the benefit of automation.

Hybrid solution – Traditional methodologies are often considered or blamed for not being able to adapt to the changes which makes software quality assurance difficult. While Agile approach has many credits to it but we need to think whether it applicable to all business scenarios. With that being said, we often see businesses using a combination of Agile and Waterfall models. This fusion is often a result of a trade-off to keep some level of planning and also reaping the benefits of iterative, collaborative and flexible approach.

A service provider with a proven Agile methodology in place in their domain area would be an added advantage.

Indicators for an organization’s agile mindset

Inclination to communicate and collaborate

In a good collaborative ecosystem, team members commit to meeting a joint goal, and they’re not afraid to step outside their area of specialization to help others on the team. The era of QA department working as an isolated unit is over. Now in Agile world, QA and development team work hand-in-hand to deliver much greater business value to the clients. Agile needs to work both ways, empowering testers from the top down and taking responsibility for their development from the bottom up. It’s about aligning goals across your company so that every department and every member of your staff is pulling the team in the same direction.

Understand the purpose

If a developer does not understand the purpose of a process, they will not know when to follow it and when to adapt it to their current situation. They will also not understand how to improve the process, which is a key part of developing in an Agile way. Similarly, a developer needs to understand the benefits derived out of using a particular technical practice otherwise they may not know when to use it, and when not to, or how to improvise on that practice.

It is highly recommended that senior management conduct proper training which would educate the employees regarding what being Agile is, in its true sense. This will help the team and the organization on the whole to become Agile, be flexible and learn to respond in every situation instead of reacting.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

We believe that getting working software into the client’s hands early is more important than preparing labor-intensive specification documents. In reality, it’s difficult to really know what a solution should look like until someone has a chance to see it, and use an early version.

Teams need to orient themselves to carve out a feature from the high-level requirements that can be built fast and pushed to production (say, within a couple of weeks). Conventional “gates,” sign-offs, deep-dive reviews and inspections need to be replaced with suitable techniques from Agile or by suitable automation.

Accountability at the team level

Different teams developing pieces sequentially in different sprints makes it more difficult to understand when all the teams will complete their pieces of functionality and be ready to integrate and deliver them.  One team running late delivering their piece may impact the schedule of other teams.

Different teams working in the same sprint creates a lack of ownership for the feature.  The challenges are coordinating the teams working on the same feature and making all teams accountable for design and delivery.

Teams should have an open mindset to embrace change

Whenever you plan a set of features for a release, work with the customer to see if they could make use of a subset of those features. If so, release that subset first. You must then make sure that the features are really what the customer wants. At the very least you should be looking for customer feedback early and often, and building what the customer wants, rather than what you’d like to build.

Look for the following factors within your team

Data gathered by Scrum Foundation founders Sutherland, renowned software productivity researcher Caper Jones from SPR and leading Scrum Consultants have measured gains ranging from 450-750% by Scrum teams over the velocity of waterfall projects. However over 90% of the Scrum teams are not able to deliver the velocity seen in high performance Scrum teams.

Scrum teams have trouble measuring performance. Teams do not know their velocity of production and ways to improve and measure this rate. Management teams too are finding it difficult to compare performance of their Scrum teams. Scrum teams need a set of reliable light weight metrics so that Teams can monitor their performance easily and quickly correct if problems arise. The lack of appropriate metrics can prevent Scrum teams from systematically improving and reaching productivity significantly (~300-400%) better than the average waterfall team.

Scrum & Management teams require understanding of the following ten vital aspects to understand the progress made and the issues requiring correction.

Here are ten metrics that can help Scrum & Management teams to answer the above questions to develop and sustain high performance—Velocity Increase, Work Capacity, Focus Factor, Percentage of Adopted Work, Percentage of Found Work, Accuracy of Estimation, Accuracy of Forecast, Total Business Value, Success at Scale, and the Ratio of Successful Sprints of the Team.

Scrum teams should be encouraged to apply metrics to their Scrum processes, after all, the numbers tell the tale. In this whitepaper we provided a lightweight and understandable set of metrics that can be used to track a Scrum team’s performance. This simple s of metrics are easy to implement and have a powerful effect on the performance of Scrum Teams.

References

1. Scott Downey& Jeff Sutherland, “Scrum Metrics for Hyperproductive Teams: How They Fly like Fighter Aircraft”
2. Benefield, “Rolling Out Agile at a Large Enterprise” in HICSS’41, Hawaii International Conference on Software Systems
3. Jones, “Software Engineering Best Practices: Lessons from Successful Projects in the Top Companies” McGraw Hill, 2010.

The second payment services directive (PSD2) joins the global trend in banking regulation and focuses on innovation, open-data sharing, and improvement in security. As banks across Europe adopt open banking, we take a closer look at its impact on consumer behavior and the challenges before traditional banking systems.

The move to open banking has laid the impetus on banks to providing customer services that are available on-the-go. Banks have to enter the tech-race where services and products are user-friendly, secure and bug-free. HSBC responded to the new open banking directive by launching its own app, Connected Money, which enables users to access accounts from 21 different banks in one place – setting the precedence for other banks to follow.

But still, when it comes to customer experience, traditional banks are hit by FinTech companies that excel in offering streamlined customer experience. Banks cannot ignore their low Net Promoter Scores (NPS). The NPS answers the fundamental question of “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to your friends and family?” Tech companies are known to score higher on NPS and this hurts banks when non-banks start offering similar services to banks. What does this mean for banks? If a tech company like Google or Amazon is to offer a credit card or loan, their existing users would opt for the new service.

If tech companies weren’t enough, banks are also threatened by the rise of online banks – those that replace the traditional brick and mortar enterprises. Companies like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have built an online banking infrastructure that caters to SMEs and businesses.  Banks have to differentiate themselves from new entrants and incumbents by providing greater customer experience and pricing transparency.

As a direct consequence of such innovation, banks have opened up their banking operations to various industries.  Such an open-source approach is now heralding a sea of change in the finance industry through Open APIs, revolutionizing products and services quicker than ever before. Open APIs enable FinTech companies to access bank data and functionality, bringing a great change in the digital banking ecosystem.

This revolution has been fruitful for the banks who embraced Open APIs and Open architecture in building their services. However, by opening up their APIs, banks face several issues, especially in terms of security, as nothing should possibly go wrong when banks open their APIs up.

Digital developers are becoming faster at building integrations with banks using Open APIs, but they lack knowledge on business and regulatory compliance.  On the other hand, banks still need to take full accountability of all the security and compliance issues that are likely to arise.

Furthermore, the PSD2 has opened up the banking industry for new entrants to bank-held customer account data to Account Information Service Providers (AISPs). The current banking operating models constitute consumer interfaces owned by the bank. The open banking initiative can change the scenario with companies essentially taking over the interface. For example: Apple has already launched its Apple Pay services across Europe for digital payments. The service caters to in-store payments via smartphones and contactless payments. Amazon is also in the payments services where it provides loans and credit cards. With the introduction of their voice-enabled speakers, Echo, Amazon has enabled ease of everyday banking. Users can say “Alexa, pay my electricity bill” and the process would be over in a jiffy.

Even though big banks don’t face any imminent danger in losing customers, not adopting technology or creating strategic alliances could mean the loss of business. Currently, traditional financial organizations rely on FinTech for their technological needs – from chatbots to cloud computing. What keeps FinTechs from taking over the finance industry is the strong regulatory compliance framework. The entry of tech giants into core banking services would rattle the banking industry and effectively change the financial landscape. If banks don’t up their digital game they will get eaten up by well-established tech companies. The future may seem uncertain for now, but one thing is sure that open banking is here to stay. It would be interesting to see who wins the banking battle between banks, FinTechs and non-banking companies.