Spend some time in Apple's App Store browsing the free online banking apps for the iPad, and you see a quite a few iPhone apps masquerading as iPad apps, failing to take advantage of the iPad's bigger screen and ability to host more sophisticated graphics.
Such is not the case with Citi's new consumer banking app for the iPad, which the bank officially debuted this morning. "We wanted to start fresh and think about how people are using this form factor," says Tracey Weber, managing director, internet and mobile at Citi (and formerly, president of Travelocity). "People are using their iPads in the evenings, on their couches to do reading and play games. What we came to is it's about engagement, reading and video, so we wanted it to take advantage of those things and not look at all like our mobile app or our internet site."
The app tries to take advantage of navigational devices on the iPad, such as the ability to advance a tool forward with a swipe of the finger. "We want people to feel like they're engaging with it," Weber says. "We feel the ability to swipe and use sliders to look at different timeframes will help people feel they're engaging in a different way than they do in mobile apps and the internet," Weber says.
The new app provides several personal financial management features. An Analyze section lets users examine their own spending data. A cash flow chart, for instance, lets customers look at outgoing payments in the past and future, "so you can see how well your cash flow is going to work out, or not work out," Weber says. There are graphics that show how other customers who fit a similar profile are spending their money. This information comes from anonymized, proprietary Citi credit card spend data. To match their own profile or compare themselves to people in other demographics or other places, users can filter by location, spend category, age segment, income bracket, and household type. The iPad app also offers access to other resources to help them manage their financial lives, including access to content from Citi Personal Wealth Management and Women & Co., a service of Citibank.
Citi also has iPad apps for institutional clients (Citi Velocity) and its private banking customers (Citi Private Bank Mobile).
