To conclude our Mobile App Benchmarketing blog series, we’ve taken a brief look into the importance of Global Benchmarking. If you’ve been following the series from the beginning you’ll know we began by conducting a thorough investigation of four banks in the USA, pitting the highest-performing banks against their peers to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, and to gain a better understanding of performance across the market. It’s easy to benchmark your business against competitors in your market, but consideration needs to be given to the strategic advantage of analysing wider market data to identify global trends that you can apply to your own business.
It may seem unnecessary to compare, say, a provincial Canadian bank with a stalwart UK institution like Lloyds - what information could be gained from two banks that are unlikely to compete directly for customers? By applying a standardised set of measurements to leading banks in markets across the world, we can gain a better understanding of the core issues customers care about and use this to draw data-driven conclusions about how global trends drive market changes. Comparing markets on a global scale can help you understand the future of your local market while providing ideas for improvement that have already been tested by industry leaders worldwide.
By continuing to analyse publicly available mobile app data from the app store in Ipiphany, Touchpoint Group’s AI customer analytics platform, we were able to compare leading banks from five countries - Lloyds in the UK, Scotiabank in Canada, Wells Fargo in the US, ANZ in Australia, and DBS in Singapore and gain an immediate high-level understanding of each bank’s positioning.
Although Scotiabank and DBS are highly competitive in their local markets, a comparison to Wells Fargo, ANZ, and Lloyds bank clearly illustrates a disparity between the groups.
In our previous posts we delved into each element (Benchmarking, Competitor Analysis, SURF Pillar analysis and root cause) between banks, however as a top-line overview example in this post, we will highlight the ease of finding insights that can lead to actionable outcomes by using Lloyds Bank, the highest performer out of the 5 global banks.
As part of a basic SURF Pillar analysis, we analysed each bank app’s features in order to understand what customers felt was most important to their mobile banking experience.
Lloyds is a clear winner amongst the three, across the board with a leading overall score (4.5)* with high scores from customers discussing the account balance and management features; especially payee management. Using Ipiphany, it’s easy to drill down in each customer app review to a granular level, so we investigated what it was about the payee management feature that Lloyds customers loved so much.
Ipiphany quickly highlighted the most common reason customers discussed positively about the payee management feature: it sends a text confirmation when a new payee is added as an additional layer of security. Customers rate this feature and its aspects highly and frequently enough that it has a measurable positive impact on Lloyds’ app score.
Ipiphany’s Natural Language Understanding capability is able to identify all customers discussing the payee management feature despite different ways users describe the functionality.
This text confirmation is fairly simple and easy to implement which customers clearly adore, it’s an example of a vital piece of information (insight) that you can apply as you work on improving your own bank’s app positioning.
While conducting our analysis of global leaders, we identified evidence of an important emerging trend in the UK market that is already beginning to spread to the rest of the world. In the review data from the Lloyds mobile app, we discovered that users frequently discuss how much they appreciate the ability to link multiple bank accounts from other banks - all within the Lloyds app. When this feature is mentioned, the segment consists almost entirely of five-star reviews.
These users are discussing Open Banking - the government-regulated system of sharing financial information between providers, allowing for a clear view of your finances and an easy to manage financial portfolio.
While Open Banking as a concept has been around since 2016 - a veritable lifetime in technology years - it has become an increasingly important trend to watch in 2020 as the adoption of mobile technologies reaches an all-time high. The customers in our example discuss at great length the convenience, ease of use, and simplicity of this system; others will follow as adoption accelerates. As awareness of the benefits of Open Banking grows, customers will continue to demand it from their financial providers.
Early adopters have identified the opportunity to provide a higher level of service to their customers through easy access to Open Banking tools. Banks that are more reticent to implement open banking functionality for their customers may soon be left behind, facing higher levels of churn as customers switch to banks that provide all the tools they need.
Next week, we’ll investigate how customers discuss open banking across five leading banks in the UK to learn more about how this revolutionary revision of the banking system might impact financial service institutions across the globe.
Ipiphany helps you gain a clear view of your positioning in both global and local markets, analysing open text reviews to understand your customers’ issues and pain points with enough granular detail to provide suggested solutions. Contact us to get a demo with your data today.
*data drawn from the Google Play and Apple App stores from a date range of January 2019 to July 2020. Reviews not containing comments have been eliminated from this dataset.
Are you looking for an efficient way to benchmark your business against competitors? Contact us and let us know what you'd like to learn and we'll tell you how Touchpoint Group can help you make data-driven decisions that benefit your customers.