Delivering the best digital experience in Asia

With mobile banking users worldwide set to double to 1.8b by 2019, how can Asian banks develop a seamless mobile and online banking experience to consumers?

Internet users in Asia Pacific now account for 50.2 percent of the world’s population (compared to 49.8 percent for the rest of the world). Smartphone users in Asia Pacific are estimated at 1,139.8 million in 2016 and poised to reach 1,483.4 million in 2019. With pervasive access to a digital device, the drive toward digital services has changed how we live and work – and how we bank.

Banks are increasingly leveraging technology to make processes more efficient, increase customer engagement, and improve customer service. Many banks in Asia Pacific have progressed from simply offering real-time digital access to financial information, to providing secure and user-friendly applications that enable users to make financial transactions, anytime and anywhere, without having to visit physical banks or automated teller machines (ATMs). And this trend is accelerating. KPMG estimates that the number of mobile banking users worldwide will double to 1.8 billion by 2019 – with Asia as the main driver of this trend.

Panin Bank’s MobilePanin

One of the region’s early digital banking adopters is Panin Bank in Indonesia, one of the largest and most influential banks in the country. In mid-2016, it upgraded its mobile banking platform to Mobiliti™ from Fiserv, enabling it to launch MobilePanin, which has become the most comprehensive, reliable, and secure mobile banking and internet banking service available to consumers in Indonesia.

MobilePanin provides customers not only access to key banking information and functions, but also connects them seamlessly to InternetPanin, the bank’s online banking service. This enables the delivery of comprehensive digital banking capabilities on-the-go, including bills payments, checking of account balances, real-time money transfer, account balance and limit transaction alerts, foreign exchange and interest rate updates, purchase of top-up mobile vouchers, and more.

There has been an increasing demand for MobilePanin, driven by the large population of smartphone users in Indonesia, a highly dispersed geography, and inconvenience of local transportation. The mobile app has enabled customers, especially those from more remote parts of the country, to not waste time and resources unnecessarily by travelling to where physical banks or ATMs are located. As for the bank, Panin has seen an average of 18 to 25 percent increase of users since the mobile app was launched. As of February 2017 – just nine months following its launch – the bank registered 70,000 MobilePanin users. The volume of transactions has also increased by an average of 20 percent per month, with conversion rates from branch to mobile averaging an increase of 15 percent per month.

Bangkok Bank’s Bualuang mBanking

Another early adopter of digital banking in developing Asia is Bangkok Bank Public Company Limited (BBL), one of Thailand’s largest financial institutions with a global customer base of approximately 17 million accounts. To meet the growing demands for ‘everyday, everywhere’ banking by its increasingly mobile and internet-savvy customers, BBL has been continually adding new functionality to its mobile banking application, Bualuang mBanking.

The bank’s latest deployment of Mobiliti Edge™ from Fiserv has enabled BBL to offer enhanced capabilities for Bualuang mBanking by providing a person to person (P2P) payment functionality. BBL’s customers can check account balances, manage payments and transfer money to anyone – whether bank or non-bank customers – when and where they desire. This has become a key milestone for BBL, making it a major differentiator in the Thai market.

The enhanced Bualuang mBanking has resulted in increased customer engagement and customer satisfaction, along with a decrease in BBL’s cost of serving customers. As of October 2016, BBL had registered a 40 percent growth in transactions, a 60 percent rise in the number of registered users, a 20 percent increase in average financial transaction usage per user per month, and a 300 percent growth in average payment transaction volume per month.

These are just some of the business benefits generated by BBL’s enhanced Bualuang mBanking solution. The bank expects more benefits to come as the bank continues to transform and revolutionise digital banking offerings to meet the fast-changing demands of increasingly mobile customers.

Regardless of where banks are in their current digital transformation, banks can focus on developing relevant capabilities that would add value to their product and service offerings. Designing mobile and online banking experiences for customers that fit seamlessly into their everyday lives is key to remaining relevant in today’s competitive banking environment.

By Marc Mathenz, senior vice president and managing director, Asia Pacific, Fiserv