In the face of stiff competition in the digital banking space, mobile banking innovation has become a keystone strategy for service providers. Implementing fresh and innovative banking ideas is now a competitive necessity for acquiring and retaining younger customers, accelerating financial inclusion, and opening up new global markets.
The increasing ubiquity of mobile phones and emerging consumer trends in a post-pandemic world have turned some innovative mobile banking features into low-hanging fruit opportunities to spur growth by reducing cost per acquisition (CPA).
The Covid-19 pandemic propelled a global transition into a digital lifestyle, making contactless banking services a mainstay of payments and motivating more users to use digital services to manage personal budgets, gift card purchases and retail investing, many for the first time in their lives.
The ease, speed, and range of new mobile banking features now make online banking services more than just a personal finance tool – but rather a lifestyle platform opportunity that users can depend on for many services that were traditionally not offered by banks.
Thus, to stay ahead of the curve, mobile banking service providers must increasingly look to integrate relevant, innovative features that fit their business model and these emerging consumer preferences.
While there are a bunch of features that digital businesses can now offer on their mobile banking apps, they should choose to short list innovative mobile banking features that are:
- High in demand: Some mobile banking features are more important to customers than others, and this often depends on where your market lives and works. Service providers should offer features that are relevant to customers and that have a strong accessible market demand.
- Easy to manage: Financial services require stringent, often complicated management processes, from legal compliance to recording payment processes, technical management, and more. Ideally, mobile service providers should look to add features that can be used with a few clicks, disrupting the old model of paperwork that traditional banks have been known for.
- Scalability: Some mobile banking features can scale business revenues better than others. While businesses should focus on value, they can often do so with low-cost tools that can be implemented faster and scaled without friction.
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What Trends are Propelling Mobile Banking Innovation Today
Offering innovative mobile banking features has become increasingly important to open new markets, especially in emerging market regions where smartphone penetration growth is the highest in the world.
However, innovative banking ideas are just as important in saturated developed markets, where digital businesses have their work cut out for them to retain and acquire new users.
Several things are propelling a range of new and traditionally non-banking services to become mixed into fintechs.
Today, mobile banking service providers (or digital businesses looking to enter the space) are, launching added-value features due to the following trends:
- Increased mobile penetration: Mobile phone usage has increased by over 73.9% in the past six years, with over 6.5 billion people smartphone holders. Today, over 80% of the total global population (estimated at 7.9 billion) uses mobile phones, and spends hours on them daily, making banking on mobile devices more convenient than ever.
- The explosion of mobile wallets: Mobile wallets are now increasingly commonplace as mobile phone usage increases. The global market size for mobile wallets in 2022 is estimated at $64 billion, an exponential leap from $6.6 billion in 2016. Between 2010 and 2020, cash transactions fell by 50% as mobile payments increased.
- Increasing customer dependence: More customers are completely reliant on mobile banking, especially in developing parts of the world across Latin America, Africa and Asia where brick-and-mortar banks aren’t conveniently available. These customers are now increasingly savvy, and they expect more innovative features to improve their mobile banking experience.
In the below list, we’ll cover just what features are helping businesses better address these above trends.
Let’s jump into it.
8 Innovative Mobile Banking Features and Business Ideas to Grow and Retain Customers
The best mobile banking features today can expand your business offerings in ways that add completely new streams of income.
Here, besides increasing your bottom line, we have gone a step further to highlight mobile banking features and ideas that have been proven to also increase customer fulfillment and make your platform a lifestyle channel for multiple kinds of services.
Below are some of the best features out there today that can be easily and quickly integrated on digital banking platforms.
1. Enhanced payments
Payment services are crucial to mobile banking, and innovations that enhance payments also improves customer experience.
Some innovations that have enhanced payments today include:
- P2P payments: Peer-to-peer (P2P) payments allow transactions between users directly from their accounts or credit cards. When payment requests are made by the sender to the recipient’s address, they are often executed immediately. P2P payments significantly enhance customer experience, especially when they are easy to use, secure and instant.
- Voice payments: With the increase in the use of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, voice payments are becoming an attractive innovative banking feature. With voice payments, users can order digital assistants to make payments with a voice command. The use of voice payments is on an uptrend, with 31% of Americans having adopted voice payments in 2022.
2. Budgeting and planning
Mobile banking services can offer budgeting and planning features to help users optimize their money, save more and schedule payments.
With simple budgeting features, a user can plan expenditures for a certain period of time, categorize their monthly expenses and automate savings, usually by rounding off purchases and depositing the rest into an account. This way, users have a clear view of their expenses, as well as the ability to automate savings through a very simple-to-understand feature.
Additionally, some features can allow for payments on budgets to be automatically executed at a selected time, automating budgeted payments for a user.
3. Investment management
Mobile banking services can also include investment services as a value-added offer.
This is increasingly common with the rise of retail investing seen during the pandemic.
With investments in assets like stocks, ETFs, cryptocurrencies and real estate now easily accessible to many, a popular innovative banking idea for many markets could be easily enabled to allow the purchase and management of investments in real-time.
4. 24/7 customer chatbots
Accessible customer service agents, particularly as chatbots and virtual assistants, are important features to customers for two reasons.
First, they are accessible at any time of the day (24/7).
Secondly, they are helpful in guiding customers through understanding new or basic features.
Chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence that simulates human interactions. They can respond to customer enquiries in real time, keep track of recurring customer issues and offer a personalized experience.
Additionally, chatbots can improve conversational/customer experience, serve more people across different languages, provide detailed analytics and reporting, and more.
With chatbots increasingly becoming more advanced, offering recommendations and financial advice, launching this feature could be an easy way to reduce churn.
5. Airtime and data bundles
Numerous mobile banking services offer airtime and data bundle services to customers, but they often only enable them to make purchases for themselves or other individuals at a time, and with low transaction limits.
Mobile banking service providers could, however, offer more flexibility with airtime and data bundles.
Airtime and data bundles have numerous use cases: as money, for remittances, as rewards and incentives, as relief for disaster payments and more. These use cases of airtime and data bundle services makes it a relevant and in-demand kind of innovative mobile banking feature, especially as more service providers continue to offer bulk-airtime services and data bundles to fulfill these needs.
What’s more, businesses can easily integrate bulk airtime services within just a few hours or days, bringing a valuable and scalable service to market with ease.
CinetPay, an online payment gateway company based in Côte d’Ivoire, facilitated the transfer of $15,000 in airtime monthly by providing bulk airtime as an additional feature shortly after launching the new service.
6. Gift cards
Enabling the sale of digital gift cards is an innovative feature mobile banking service providers can also consider offering.
Gift cards have become vehicles for payments, remittances and incentives, making gift cards a kind of innovative transfer of value and loyalty tool that are in-demand all year round.
With the increasing utility of gift cards, whether as a digital business, a gift or marketing incentive, more mobile banking service providers can now easily sell digital gift cards as an additional feature.
7. Bill and utility payments
Bill payment aggregation is an increasingly popular feature that mobile banking service providers can offer. By enabling bills collection for utility service providers, digital businesses of many varieties can optimise payment collection and processing for utility services.
Additionally, bill payment is often herculean for customers, particularly in developing parts of the world.
By offering one-click and automated payments for customers, mobile banking service providers can make payments easier and faster for:
- Electricity bills
- Water bills
- Internet broadband bills
- TV bills and more
That way, customers can always have pay-as-you-go services available, making it a highly valuable feature for mobile banking innovation.
Mobilearth, a mobile banking service provider, offers bill and utility payments as an additional banking feature.
8. Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is increasingly becoming adopted by countries and individuals, and adding cryptocurrency payments and exchange services is a highly marketable mobile banking feature.
Mobile banking service providers could offer features such as:
- The purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies
- The use of cryptocurrency to purchase airtime, gift cards and other products
- The use of cryptocurrencies for international remittances
- Peer-to-peer crypto transactions
- Cryptocurrency as incentives and for loyalty programs
One company that offers cryptocurrency-to-airtime services is Crypto2mobile.com, a feature that was able to add liquidity to cryptocurrency exchanges through airtime.
Final thoughts
Adding innovative mobile banking features skyrockets the competitive advantage of mobile banking service providers.
With an explosion in mobile phone usage and mobile wallet transactions, offering innovative features helps capture a customer segment and expand their business revenues.
Contact our support team to upscale your mobile banking offerings by using no-contract APIs that can be easily integrated and scaled.
