Sybase365’s Head of Marketing, mCommerce, Diarmiud Mallon believes that most of the UK’s mobile banking apps suffer from the same problem – a lack of ambition.
"For some reason the UK seems to launch very unaspirational services."
When it comes to retail mobile banking, the offerings certainly are limited. As a rule for retail consumers, you may be able to transfer money (with great difficulty) and perhaps find an ATM, alongside viewing your balance and the company’s ads. Lloyds and Halifax use the same template. Santander offers some rudimentary functionality, as does RBS and NatWest – which are clones.
Barclays haven’t really bothered in the UK, customers are limited to mobile banking via HTML. Strangely, they have spent time and money producing a full blown app for the Spanish market. The company also offers the rudimentary Pingit, which is a very basic money transfer app.
"Pingit is a great service – but I would say it’s more of an individual feature of mobile banking. It’s not a service in itself," he said.
"The big American and Canadian banks have been offering person to person payments for many years now – it’s not super new. Companies like PayPal have been doing it for even longer."
But even Barclay’s poor showing has to take a backseat to HSBC’s poor effort.
It launched its Fastbalance app two weeks ago, and its functionality is about what would’ve been considered acceptable a decade ago at best. This is an iPhone App that has been awaited for years – yet has the functionality and appearance of a 24 hour ‘hack-a-thon’ piece of software made by 14 year olds. Blackberry and Android versions are to follow shortly.
Other than checking your balances (and this doesn’t include credit cards), you can only view your last 5 transactions and pay pre-pay phone bills. Its functionality is similar to requesting your bank balance via SMS circa 1999.
Compared to its business app – which is far more functional – it’s safe to presume that UK developer Monitise were simply not allowed to create anything good. It is so bad; it already has hopeful pundits claiming it is some kind of ‘place-holder’ app until the real thing launches.
"It just seems very odd that the services here in the UK are so very unaspirational. I’m not entirely sure why," says Mallon.
The banks often claim security as a problem, especially online. Just this year HSBC has introduced its laborious SecureKey PIN system, and Barclays has gone a step further with its Pinsentry Card Reader for internet banking. These basically place the burden of security on the customer through a series of labourious password inputs.
Mallon believes the security excuse doesn’t wash.
"The American banks have just as many rules and regulations, if not more. In fact the [mobile] operators there actually impose even more of their rules and regulations on top."
The US does have some regulatory differences, but there was a point where the UK industry once was ahead of their American counterparts. The UK just seems to have missed the boat on smartphones.
"It’s not just retail phone apps either – [the Americans] have some fantastic iPad apps out. There’s also a lot more business banking on mobile, which is especially useful for boosting small business," he said.
Education shouldn’t be too much of a problem, more than 50% of UK consumers own a smartphone now, and Mallon believes that our users are amongst the most mobile savvy in the world.
"If you look abroad, there’s really some amazing things being done with mobile – and there’s great potential for the UK there," he said.
