May 2022 UK Challenger Banks App Performance Snapshot

Executive Summary

Revolut has plummeted from around 3,300 reviews a month to hardly any (188 in May).

Chase is going in the opposite direction from almost none in late 2021 to over 1500 reviews a month as at May. That is actually the most frequently reviewed of all the Challenger apps, even more than Starling, the market leader.

Monzo's performance is flat, but consistent, and Monese is still the underperformer, but is showing a slow and steady increase in positive customer sentiment.

Insights into Chase Performance 

App Authentication is the journey where Chase is actually demonstrating the most pain and therefore an opportunity to close the gap on Starling

There is a 1.3 ratings points difference between Starling, who are Number 1 in Authentication, and Chase, who are Number 4. 

There seem to be issues with signing in, authentication, passcodes, and logins - so, this is clearly an area of their customer experience where they have an opportunity to improve.

In terms of negative ground to be made up, if Chase improved their Authentication feature journey they would have a lot of incremental gain to develop in relation to customer experience and therefore a flow-on effect to topline ratings. 

UK Challenger Bank Engaged Customer Score Rankings As At May 2022

Note: A deeper dive is also possible on all of these features to identify exactly what actions could be taken to make improvements and close the gap. 

If you would like a free personal deep dive insights session on your banking app performance feel free to book a discovery call.

Full Video Transcript

00:00 Glenn: Yet again to a another Touchpoint Insight Session on the UK Banking App market and this particular one in around the Challenger banks, and although it may be a Jubilee month, celebrations for some and commiserations for others, and Chase and Revolut it seems that it’s the case of divergence.

00:25 Nick: It is indeed. This is really interesting because what appears to be happening is that, and we're looking at frequency here. So, we're looking at the number of reviews that each of the banks is getting every month and the green line is Chase and the orange line is Revolut and they're going in opposite directions.

So, Revolut has plummeted from around 3,300 reviews a month to hardly any, 188 in May. Chase is going in the opposite direction from pretty much ground zero to a really healthy 1,500 reviews a month in May. That is actually the most frequently reviewed of all the challenger apps - it's more than Starling. 

I think it would be going too far to say that Chase are already stealing some of Revolut’s lunch, but it is very interesting the way this trend is emerging. If we look at what we normally look at this point, which is App Ratings, the App Absolute Engaged Customer Score with all the people that give a rating, but don't give a review stripped out - We can see also that Chase, the green line here, is actually getting very close to Starling, who's the market leader. This is a pretty healthy story for Chase all around both in terms of the share of voice that they are gaining in terms of app reviews and also in terms of the quality of customer experience that those reviewers are reporting.

I thought we'd do something a bit different and look at, what if I were in charge of Chase's app? What can I do just to tip the balance a bit further and actually take the lead from Starling in terms of the challenger banks market leadership. Let's just look at drilling down a little bit further underneath these top-line ratings.

One of the things we like to look at are these four levels - high levels of Customer Experience - Foundational Attributes, Core Customer Journeys, Incremental Banking Features, and Customer Love - and just eyeballing this. I think you can see that of all of these the one where Chase has most ground to make up on Starling is this one, level two - Core Customer Journeys, where they're about 80 basis points behind in terms of the overlap review scores. So, I think that's where we should drill down and just have a look at is there an opportunity in Core Customer Journeys for Chase to really move the needle in relation to Starling.

Here are the underlying concepts: Mobile App Update, App Account Balance Feature, App Authentication, and Deposit Check by our app for  Core Customer Journeys. Again, it's quite interesting. You can see that Chase is most behind on deposit check, but maybe that's not a particularly important category for challenger banks.

You can see the app volumes review volumes are really low. So, probably the area to make up is Authentication, or Account Balance Feature, or Mobile App Update. Now, to decide that we probably need to know a bit more about what are the relative volumes of each of these, what are the most important ones to the customer?

And there are a couple of ways to look at that. So, in terms of what is the most important of these features one very useful. This is a useful view that shows you the relative proportion of reviews that are about each app journey. It's useful because it ranks them and this is clearly showing that of all the reviews about app journeys the most reviews mention this App Authentication Journey and the next most popular subject for app journey reviews is Mobile App updates.

That narrows it down to the top two journeys where, arguably, Chase should focus if they are trying to optimize the allocation of their roadmap development resources to a particular journey. The one thing that this view doesn't do is tell you whether the reviews are positive or negative. It's helpful to know that because obviously you want to focus on the journeys - where there is the most negative experience in terms of the head room for improvement. This actually does that. It's a useful view that effectively shows you where the real pain points are in relation to each particular journey.

Clearly here, App Authentication is the journey which Chase is actually demonstrating the most pain. Chase customers are actually complaining about, in terms of issues to do with their customer experience. So, the one thing that we should probably also check is that Authentication does represent a significant gap to the market leader, Starling, who they're trying to close on. We can do that by looking at the relative ratings, and this clearly shows in terms of the ranking that there is a big gap between Starling who are Number 1 in Authentication, and Chase who are Number 4. You can see there's a 1.3 ratings point difference between them. So, this does show that in terms of negative ground to be made up, that if Chase improved the Authentication Feature journey they would have a lot of incremental gain to develop in relation to a top-line rating. 

We can look at another one just for the sake of argument. We can look at a Mobile App updates. They're rated 5, but their gap to Starling is nothing like this great. That's a further indication App Authentication should be the journey that they should focus on, and then if they wanted to take it a stage further and say, well what is it about our App Authentication experience that needs to be improved? - we can look at the verbatim. 

These are the verbatims that are coming into the app stores around Chase's authentication experience. You can see that there seem to be issues about signing in, about authentication, about pass codes, and something about logins - so, this is clearly an area of their customer experience they have the opportunity to improve on, and to improve upon that minus 1.7 net opinion they're currently experiencing.

We can contrast that with Starling’s Authentication experience which seems to be a lot more smoothly implemented, and generally speaking, customers are pretty satisfied with how they do that, and being kind of positive. 

I think this is a good demonstration really for our particular Challenger Bank. If you really do want to move the needle on your overall app store engaged customer rating, where should you focus in order to find the pain point. That is, the one where you have the most opportunity to improve and also where you can close the gap on a particular competitor. In this case, the market leader.