When it comes to mobile banking, customers' expectations are growing faster than the hair on a Chia Pet. So every year, Forrester reviews and scores the mobile banking offerings from the largest retail banks in the US across seven categories: Range of touchpoints; Enrollment and login; Account information; Transactional functionality; Service features; Cross-channel guidance; and marketing and sales. You can read the complete report here or by clicking on the link below:

Here is a sampling of some of our findings:

  • Chase and U.S. Bank tie for the top spot. With scores of 69 out of 100, Chase and U.S. Bank received the highest overall scores among the five banks we evaluated. Chase delivers the basics superbly, with a wide range of transactional features for transfers, bill pay, and P2P payments as well as strong cross-channel guidance for customers to contact Chase and find ATMs and branches. By contrast U.S. Bank stands out for more advanced features, including marketing and research for additional products, the ability to take a picture of a paper bill to enroll in bill pay, and the ability to pay another person using the contact list in a mobile phone.
  • Large US banks do the ‘basics’ very well… Certain features have become fundamental to customers’ mobile banking activities, and the banks we reviewed do a solid job of offering these features in a way that help users conveniently achieve their goals. For example, the transaction history screen is one of the most visited area of most banks’ mobile apps, and most large US banks now let mobile users easily filter, sort, and search their past transactions. Large banks also offer strong transactional features: Four of the five banks we reviewed now let customers add a payee from within the smartphone app.
  • …But lag on next-gen features like pre-login content and contextual cross-selling. All of the banks we reviewed earned overall scores over 50, indicating they are meeting customers’ basic needs and expectations. Yet when it comes to more innovative features, there’s room to improve: For example, the biggest US banks offer little to nothing in terms of pre-login account information, guidance to social media customer service, app-wide search, or digital cross-selling within the mobile banking experience. There are, however, some glimpses of inventive features: Wells Fargo’s login screen includes key content and links to the firm’s YouTube channel, and U.S. Bank embeds marketing in the iPhone app (see screenshot below).

I urge you to read the full report here. In addition, please feel free to let us know what you think in our comments section below.

[Images from U.S. Bank’s iPhone app show the bank marketing services and products like P2P payments and credit cards]