I just saw a video demo of Krungsri aka Bank of Ayudhya's mobile banking app. It's the best mobile banking app I've ever seen by far. Not just about bank balances and branch locations like the typical banking app, but also transfers, shopping, stock brokerage services, rewards redemption, bill payments, reminders, social features, and so on and so forth. Some of this is even available to non-Krungsri customers. The only thing that detracts from their effort is that they only support smartphones (maybe only iPhones).
This may all sound obvious, possibly even a little "so what?" depending on how cynical you are -- but my experience with other mobile banking apps (if an app even exists for your bank) has been complete c**p, even in supposedly advanced Singapore. Other banks' apps I've seen may:
- provide pretty basic bank balance type info
- use the mobile phone purely as a channel for poorly thought through "promotions"
- pretend that they're a fun social networking app that people will enjoy using, not realizing that consumers look to banks for functionality not fun
- have such poor user flow that frustrated consumers uninstall them immediately
Both regional and global banks are guilty of the above.
Youtube should have a video of Krungsri's app that shows you what I found so admirable about it in comparison to the above all-too-common faults in other banks' approaches.
The presenter of the demo pointed out that their approach was to take a marketing approach from the beginning, rather than IT. The focus was on user experience, which doesn't mean pretty graphics but imagining what a customer, whether a young student, a high net worth individual or anyone else might need and delivering that simply. Technology considerations (and the inevitable arguments with the IT department) came later.
Clearly they know what they're doing.
Update: This is the demo I saw.
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