May 2022 US Regional Banks App Performance Snapshot

Executive Summary

Outside of the consistent high performers of TD Bank and Santander the Regional Banks are not showing the consistency that we like to see in Engaged Customer Scores (ECS).

This can indicate a reactive rather than proactive approach to app maintenance and development.

KeyBank customer sentiment has indicated inconsistent performance leading to an overarching slide downwards in Engaged Customer Score and user experience. An overall drop of 30% in ECS over the past 13 months that can be related to the cumulative effect of a number of smaller underlying problems rather than the big issues that are dealt with as they crop up.

TD Bank US vs Fifth Third Performance Insights

TD Bank is leading across all SURF pillars of mobile app performance (Security and Authentication, Usability, Reliability, and Functionality).

Core Features: 

A clear performance gap is visible in the app Cheque Deposit feature with Fifth Third. A gap of 1.2 ECS points, clearly highlighting a feature that, if Fifth Third invested and or prioritized resources, could bridge the performance gap and increase the overall user experience and Engaged Customer Score of the Fifth Third app.

Likewise, the Cheque Deposit journey is one of the strongest performing journeys and features for TD Bank US, which is giving a healthy boost to the overarching experience and score given by users.

One other secondary area that Fifth Third could prioritize investigations and resources into is the App Payment feature where it is lagging behind TD Bank by 0.6 engaged customer score points.

Regional Banks Rankings

Full Video Transcript 

00:00 Glenn: Hello everybody and welcome back to yet another insight session this month, it’s May 2022. Looking at the US Regionals banks and the mobile performance in each of these segments and the hero of 2022 so far is TD bank and consistency is key. Tony Patrick is going to take us for a little bit of an insights journey around what they've been doing so consistently well and we're also going to touch, Tony, on Fifth Third as well aren't we? And a couple of areas that they're doing quite strongly in and areas where we can compare them to TD Bank, and they can make a few gains. Over to you my friend.
 

00:42 Tony: Yeah, we certainly can Glenn. So, TD is the focus today, but you can see here, the Regional Banks, we're going to cover off looking at TD Bank, KeyBank, Santander, Fifth Third, Regions, Huntington, M&T, and Citizens. So there among the mix of what we'll cover today.

The first one, I always start off with this. It's a nice starting perspective, what are the trends we can see in this data? Actually, one of the things I can see across these Regionals is that a few of these banks are not showing the consistency that we like to see - we've seen in other areas.

We see a bit of ups and downs going on. So problems happen. They go and fix them and some problems happen again and they're fixed again. So, getting consistency is really important.

What we can see, one of the things I can see though is, with KeyBank, and we discussed KeyBank in a recent episode. What I can see here is that Key Bank actually, it sort of peaked in April last year. It did really well, but it dropped off very sharply into June. What I can see is, since probably October last year, even though we've seen some ups and downs and we're actually seeing an increase in May, the decline is actually consistently moving down from about that above 3.25 to levels about one point below that. So, it remains to be seen whether they can maintain, based on their historical work they've done, whether they can maintain this jump in May.

02:06 Glenn: Potentially a case of being reactive rather than proactive around the app and what they’re looking at doing.

02:14 Tony: I think so too, and there's probably some core issues they might not be aware of because they're sort of hidden underneath some other, major ones and they might not be aware of those, which is why that decline. They haven't probably spotted those yet, potentially. What we can also see is at the top here, we can see, I'll just put my mouse over this one, which is TD bank.

We saw that TD had some problems into September last year and they maintain those problems. There's probably three to four months where it was, a low a dip and they picked that up in March. Now, often when you see a pickup of that sort, that type there, you often see it sort of come back down, which we're seeing with others. They sort of pick up and come back down, but what we can see clearly here is that TD has picked up. It's maintained that level of leadership into April and then increased that level into May and they're sort of fighting out of the top there, amongst with Santander and also we've also got Fifth Third.

What we'll do at the end of this, just have a quick look at Fifth Third and what they can potentially do to close that gap as well. So what I will do is just have a quick look. Now this is a great, nice first perspective of how this is going now. Again, this is our SURF Pillars, which covers the areas Security and Authentication, Usability, Reliability, and Functionality.

These areas here give us a great understanding about what your score is going to be. You improve these things, your score will definitely go up, and of course, being low on these things is better because these are pain points, and one of the highlights for TD is things like we can see here with Security that's sitting on around 3, although Fifth Third is actually doing a similar position around 3%, this is in May this year. So, they're doing reasonably well on their Security and Authentication with Fifth Third, but where we see TD do really well is consistency across the board. So Usability 7%, Reliability 9%, and Functionality 10%.Issues with Functionality are very low.

If you want to compare that directly to KeyBank, we can see you can triple all these things and more to hit what KeyBank are up to, so KeyBank have a lot of work across the board to improve. So what I’ll look at now is just the same data we just saw, but stack that up so we can see what's the overall pain points are from the SURF Pillar Perspective.What we can see here is that TD is sitting below 30%. We have seen that U.S. Bank actually sits about 10% or lower sometimes, so that is our benchmark across the globe, but we see here, TD sort of getting close to that, and that's why it's leading in this.

We see that Santander and Fifth Third are sitting around that 55% level somewhere around there. That's why they're sitting in that second place and not in the first place at the moment. They have some room to improve across there. So, what I can have a look at now is, let's have a look at Fifth Third compared to TD.

Fifth Third is competing up the top there with Santander and TD, but what makes them different? Where are FifthThird doing well and where can they improve? What we're looking at here is the average score when people talk about these particular features. Now, we've got these features in this order for a reason, these are the most important things to people.

Obviously the very first one, logging in isn't a core banking function, but of course, when that goes wrong, it's a massive problem for customers because they cannot get to any features from that point. So, obviously it's a very important one, a gateway area to actually make sure you've got that working. Now, Fifth Third actually is doing well. We saw that previously where they only had about 3% issues in that area. So they're scoring reasonably well at 1.9, compared to 1.6 for TD. Here higher is better. Then we hit through, these next couple of features where App Check Deposit is sitting at 2.8 there for Fifth Third and it's sitting at 4 for TD.

So for TD, it's actually having a really positive contribution to their score and people are having a really good experience on that Check Deposit journey in terms of scanning and all that process. Whereas for Fifth Third, it's not. So here is a key place where Fifth Third could make some improvements, we can also see that the app Payment feature isn't quite up to scratch for FifthThird.

It's sort of sitting about 0.6 points behind TD, but there are some really good things that Fifth Third are doing like the Transfer of Funds feature, it’s slightly ahead of TD in that area. So they're doing a really positive thing, and again, potentially maybe with the biometric login, so that's connected to the whole login area and it looks like that's doing pretty well in that space.

So, very positive stuff for Fifth Third, although TD is still leading in a lot of key areas and they definitely want to aim towards being at that level or higher. Thank you, Glenn.

07:17 Glenn: Yeah, that’s great stuff mate, and really really a simple visualization of what you can focus on to either keep the gap or bridge the gap between your nearest competitors, and prioritize those actions, and those features, and functions that you can really work on to close that gap.

So, really appreciate the insights. It's great to see the Ipiphany tool getting showcased like this and simplifying the process of understanding the app world.

If you would like a deeper look at your bank and your app and where you can close the gap on your competition, feel free to reach out to Tony or I on LinkedIn, you can check them out on our website, and feel free to drop us a line. We're more than happy to have a chat and give you a few insights yourself.

Thanks folks.