U.S. Bank was recently ranked at the top of two sets of consumer surveys about the quality of mobile banking apps.
In Javelin Strategy & Research's annual mobile banking scorecard, the Minneapolis bank took the number-one position by being easy to use and having strong security controls, according to Emmett Higdon, digital banking director at Javelin. Bank of America and Wells Fargo were second and third, respectively.
"U.S. Bank pays attention to the things that matter," Higdon said.
The bank also ranked first in Insider Intelligence's most recent mobile banking benchmark in 2023. It scored 61 points out of 100, which was 18 points higher than the average participant in the study. It won in the alerts and account management categories.
"U.S. Bank has really been stepping up the global experience to meet consumer satisfaction as well as innovation," said Tiffani Montez, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
Interviews with U.S. Bank leaders and analysts show the bank has been upping its mobile banking game with many small-seeming improvements.
What U.S. Bank did to improve
The top two drivers of online and mobile banking satisfaction in Javelin's annual digital banking survey of 11,000 consumers have long been ease of use and what Javelin calls "security empowerment," its term for customer-facing security tools.
In the past year, both of these categories became even more important to consumers, according to the Javelin survey, and accounted for almost two-thirds of overall satisfaction with mobile banking. U.S. Bank's strengths in both categories helped it rise to the top this year.
"If you ask consumers how to design a product, whether it's digital banking or mobile banking, they're going to react by what they know, and what they know is it should be easy to use and safe," said Mark Schwanhausser, also digital banking director at Javelin. "If you can't do those two things, it's a non-starter."
Security and ease of use were also prominent in Insider Intelligence's recent survey of 1,894 U.S. adults. More than half (55%) of consumers put the ability to alert customers when their Social Security number is breached at the top of a list of 35 features, according to Montez.
About 44% of consumers said getting an insufficient funds alert when there isn't enough money in their account to cover a payment was the most valuable mobile banking feature, 42% cited the ability to make real-time external transfers, and the same percentage chose providing easy-to-understand transactions.
Ease of use
That last feature is something U.S. Bank has been working on for a few years. With help from data aggregator MX, it has made transaction records much more understandable, for instance by providing actual merchant names in transaction records, rather than unrecognizable merchant codes. It has also made transactions more searchable. This aligns with the top two things people use mobile banking for, according to Javelin's research: to check their balances and to look for specific transactions.
U.S. Bank also provides geographic mapping of every transaction — seeing the street corner on which a purchase took place can help jog a customer's memory about a transaction, according to Ankit Bhatt, chief digital executive at U.S. Bank.
"They're on their phone, they want a glanceable view," Bhatt said. This use of location data doesn't trip up data privacy issues because the bank is already receiving location information, he said. The bank also provides merchant logos for some transactions to give customers an extra visual aid.
Alerts are another area where U.S. Bank shines, according to the Javelin analysts. The bank's alerts always come with a call to action, so for instance, if an alert tells a customer that a payment is overdue, it also provides a path to the bill payment part of the app.
"We're making sure that there's always a helpful next step for the client versus just making them informational," Bhatt said.
U.S. Bank also has tools for helping clients manage their spending with insights. For instance, an alert might tell a customer that based on their transaction activity, they could save $250 more per month and still pay their bills, and then show them how to set up automated savings.
In Insider Intelligence's latest mobile banking app benchmark, 45% of consumers said the most valuable mobile banking feature was the ability to set up electronic direct deposit directly from within the app, a feature U.S. Bank has.
Other banks provide a way for customers to change their direct deposit account, but typically the customer has to fill out a form.
"Oftentimes when you think about mobile experiences, and you talk to banks about the features and the capabilities they offer, they'll say, we've had direct deposit for 10 years, but having direct deposit for 10 years isn't necessarily the right answer," Montez said. "What banks are missing the mark on is going back and looking at the features that they developed years ago and making sure that those features, given the new technology available in the market, actually produce a frictionless experience."
Ten years ago, it was fine to provide a PDF form and let a customer print it and give it to their employer, she said.
"But now there's the technology available to allow banks to be able to automate that process for the consumer inside mobile banking," Montez said.
In the same vein, U.S. Bank has introduced dynamic onboarding, where if people sign up for a credit card, they can immediately add the card to a digital wallet and start using it.
In Javelin's research, consumers also ranked U.S. Bank highest in a category the analyst firm calls "financial fitness." U.S. Bank offers account aggregation and budgeting tools that work across all of the customer's accounts, whether they are at the Minneapolis-based bank or another financial institution.
"We're helping clients better manage their spending as we provide them insights like, Hey, based on your transaction activity, based on your inflow and outflow, $250 more per month, and automating that process," Bhatt said. "These individualized insights go a long way toward creating trust with clients."
Security
"Security has long been one of the top reasons why consumers put their trust in banks," Schwanhausser said. "It's always been a fairly heavily weighted category. it just happened to go up more this year."
Many banks are trying to educate consumers about security threats more effectively, he said. Some, including U.S. Bank, are providing security centers in their mobile apps where consumers can see all the security controls they can use.
"This is a big change because two years ago we looked at the top five apps, and security wasn't even on the homepage," Schwanhausser said.
"Consumers want to feel like they're in control," Schwanhausser said. For instance, if consumers can't find their credit cards, they want to be able to go to the app and turn the cards off.
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U.S. Bank's security center gives each customer a security rating based on factors like whether or not they use two-factor authentication, when they last logged in and whether or not they give access to data to third parties.
This is all explained to customers, Bhatt said.
"The idea behind that is transparency and giving the clients control to manage their security, which is obviously fundamental to banking," Bhatt said. The bank also educates consumers about fraud, risk and security protocols, for instance by giving them warning when they are sending money to someone they've never paid before.
Overall, U.S. Bank is good at evolving, Montez said.
"They're continuously reevaluating their features to determine, is it still the right experience based on consumer behavior and the technology available in the market today?" she said. "And if not, should we be stepping up that experience to be able to better satisfy consumers' needs?"
