The mobile app is your brand’s new front door. Your app’s UI and UX are the ambiance of your flagship mobile branch. Credit unions invest millions of dollars to ensure the in-branch experience is welcoming, beautiful, and frictionless. It’s about time the same level of care, attention, and resources are allocated to the mobile app.
But is there value in this?
In short, yes.
To better illustrate why, let’s start here. Recently, I saw an article saying that Apple is the first company to reach $3 trillion in market value. Clearly, Apple has mastered UI/UX and it makes a big impact on their brand and bottom-line. The difference between UI/UX leaders and laggards is comparable to the difference of walking into an Apple Store versus Sam’s Club. The former is beautiful, curated, and experiential, whereas the latter is purely transactional and bare bones.
UI/UX offers the building blocks for delivering a superior member experience. By nailing the member experience, you can form an emotional connection with your members. That emotional connection allows you to foster more rewarding relationships. Without a great UI/UX and emotional connection, your relationships will never be more than transactional.
For credit unions to follow in Apple’s footsteps, they need to take a dedicated approach to their members’ mobile banking experience. In our research, credit unions with great mobile UI/UX generate more committed, engaged, and profitable members. So, without further ado, I present:
Top 9 Ways Your Mobile UI/UX Improves Your Credit Union (Holistically)
- Increases loyalty by deepening the relationship with the member;
- Reduces branch service costs by moving routine transactions to mobile self-service;
- Increases member retention, which causes less churn and leads to a greater member lifetime value (LTV);
- Improves service delivery and NPS satisfaction;
- Increases the amount of product adoption per member;
- Increases share of wallet with a greater probability that members will select you as their primary financial institution (PFI);
- Increases average transaction volume and size;
- Increases time spent with members on higher value opportunities; and
- Leads to products that command higher priced, premium experience products instead of simple utility services.
UI, UX, and Why They Matter
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) represent two primary facets of the digital member experience at your credit union.
UI is what we use to interface with the digital world—it’s the visual interface we use to access technology, such as web browsers, mobile apps, and enterprise software dashboards.
UX is how we interact with the digital world—it’s the actions we take to accomplish tasks within the UI, such as searching for a website, navigating through a mobile banking app, or sending and receiving emails.
UI and UX are extremely important for mobile apps. Good UI and UX drive engagement. Bad UI and UX will send users looking for a better alternative. Click here to see the most common mobile UI/UX mistakes in CU apps!
A study by Alkami found that a consumer’s satisfaction with a financial institution’s digital banking experience (aka UI/UX) is the highest correlated attribute (out of ten tested) to overall credit union satisfaction—more highly correlated than customer service, product innovations, and branch and ATM locations.
https://www.bai.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/the-increasing-importance-of-ux.pdf
Why You Should Care
From the beginning, CU 2.0 has been focused on helping credit union boards, CEOs, and management teams understand the coming wave of digital transformation and fintech.
When I first wrote Credit Union 2.0, most credit unions didn’t even have mobile responsive websites. Luckily, those days are over. But, with most credit unions using the same 5 mobile banking vendors, there’s a big opportunity to distance your credit union from the competition by focusing on digital UI/UX, personalization, and better digital service.
According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, mobile is the most important consumer touchpoint and is the most customer-centric channel, yet most credit unions offer outdated mobile web-apps that erode confidence and trust because consumers compare those app experiences against those of leading big-tech companies.
Increasing satisfaction and building brand awareness have become lagging legacy strategies. Neither will give you an edge over the competition because members’ preferred and primary interaction with your brand is digital..
Beyond Satisfaction, Emotional Connection Is What Really Matters
Experiences are often emotional moments that members have thanks to their credit unions. Yet 79% of members still regard their relationship with financial institutions as “purely transactional.”
There’s more value in emotions than in satisfaction. Retail banking customers who report high levels of emotional connection with their PFI are more profitable than those who report being “Highly Satisfied.”
The numbers bear this out. These are the advantages of emotionally connected members over highly satisfied ones:
- 52% more annual value generated
- 20% more products held
- 6X more revenue produced
- 78% lower attrition rate measured
- 32% more likely to claim their bank as their PFI
The trend is similar for cardholders. Emotionally connected cardholders generate nearly 8X the lifetime card spend, complete 71% more card transactions, spend 46% percent more with their cards annually, and use their primary cards 29% more often.
I know what you’re thinking:
Great, Kirk… now how the heck can we create a scorecard to understand where we stand and the benefit we can expect by improving our mobile UI/UX ?
There are lots of ways to measure success with your mobile program. It turns out there are many ways to skin this cat (no cats were harmed in the writing of this blog). We’ve provided a basic mobile banking UI/UX scorecard for you to use below.
As a bonus, if you keep scrolling, we’ll provide a litany of statistics on the following 7 areas of mobile banking UI/UX:
- ROM: Return on Mobile Experience
- Retention and Adoption Scorecard
- Member Channel and Product Adoption Scorecard
- EMM: Engaged Mobile Member Scorecard
- Lifetime Value Scorecard
- Cost to Serve Scorecard
- Mobile Transaction Scorecard
Basic UI/UX Impact Score Card
| Metric | Rank your CU 1-10 | Potential Impact of a Leading Mobile UI/UX |
| App Store ratings (satisfaction) | A 10% increase in satisfaction can increase revenue 2%–3% — McKinsey | |
| Mobile banking experience
(beyond just ratings) |
CX leaders delivered (CAGR) of 17% compared to just 3% for companies that failed to deliver on CX. — Lightco | |
| Fully digital accounts | JPMorgan estimates that the cost of serving a fully digital account is 70% less than a traditional account. — source | |
| Amount of mobile interactions | It is estimated that 88% of all interactions will be mobile by 2023. — CACI | |
| Active mobile members | Credit unions generate 66% more revenue from mobile banking members than branch-only members, and 8.5% higher average revenue than online-only members. | |
| Churn or retention rate | A 2% improvement in retention can have the same financial benefit of cutting costs by 10%. | |
| Product holding per member | 2.1X greater likelihood that members will increase their portfolio of new products and services from financial institutions that lead in customer experience (CX.) — Finextra | |
| Digital branch visits (logins/sessions) | 6X more mobile logins than on desktop, and 4X more mobile logins than branch transactions. | |
| Net Promoter Score (NPS) | Highly satisfied customers are 2X more likely than less-satisfied customers to increase deposits, and 2.5X more likely to open a new account or sign up for a new product. — MCKinsey | |
| Member LTV | Consumers who have an emotional connection with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value — Financial Brand | |
| Engaged mobile members | Fully engaged customers produce “an estimated $212 more in annual profit” than their inactive counterparts. — Source |
Click here to get notified when the full version of this report drops: CU 2.0’s Mobile UI/UX Guide
